


a better sail

by stutter



Category: RuPaul's Drag Race (US) RPF
Genre: Enemies to Lovers, F/M, Figs, M/M, Magical Realism, Odyssey AU, Pigs, TW: Knives, copious anachronism, gender fluidity, in a really literal sense, no knowledge of the odyssey required, queer sex, serving fish, snatched wigs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-19
Updated: 2021-01-07
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:07:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 35,198
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27635198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stutter/pseuds/stutter
Summary: “I know who you are, all right?” Trixie says. He shifts his balance. Knife, lyre, sachet of holy herbs, wineskin. He marks them mentally on his body, makes a sundial of himself, tells time by the tools he carries.Katya strokes the bird’s tiny head. “Oooh.” He’s mocking him, his eyes bright with laughter. Trixie knows calm is the deadliest weapon in his arsenal, but it’s one of the few he hasn’t mastered.“Yeah,” he goes on, “and your whole thing isn’t gonna work on me.”“Oooooh!”He waggles his fingers in the air. “Not my whole thing!”Trixie's a champion on an endless tour of the sea. Katya's a witch living on an enchanted island. The rest is (ancient Greek) history.
Relationships: Trixie Mattel/Katya Zamolodchikova
Comments: 191
Kudos: 130





	1. god of lying

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> just go with me on this one, okay?
> 
> endless thanks to [beanierose](https://archiveofourown.org/users/beanierose/pseuds/beanierose) for the million incredible things you do for me, including your marvelous beta work, your endless cheerleading, and your consistent willingness to be friends with me despite my doing shit like this. i am so, so lucky. to the whole rhombus, thank you. everyone deserves friends so good and supportive.
> 
> this fic definitely owes a massive intellectual debt to madeline miller's incredible [Circe](https://bookshop.org/books/circe-9781549117640/9780316556323).
> 
> there is (of course) [a playlist.](https://www.tinyurl.com/stuttersail) I hope you like it.

  
_...Vanity, vanity, forcing your  
will on the world. Don’t try to make a stronger wind,  
you’ll wear yourself out. Build a better sail. You  
want to solve something? Get out of your own way._  
\- richard siken, "self-portrait against red wallpaper"  


The witch lives on the north end of the island. Trixie can see dark smoke rising dreamily into the air even from the southern shore where he’s dropped anchor, beckoning him from over the olive trees like a finger crooked, all sultry, practically winking at him. The air’s getting cool. He opens his mouth and tastes it: green and a little spicy, night-blooming jasmine and citrus in it. Who knows what time of year it even is, now. On the ship, he had a system of notches in the wall going for a while, but he’s given it up. Every day, he wakes up all the same. Wind-scorched skin, cold like a blow to the face, still waters, the roiling of a storm. It never kills him, and then he wakes up the next day again. What else is there to know?

His shadow’s getting tall on his right side. Not too much time before the day’s gone, and he’s not about to spark up a torch and tip this hag off any further. He sucks his teeth and tightens his cloak around his shoulders. “Stupid,” he mutters to himself, and, shuffling a pebble out of one sandal, takes off into the sun-shot trees.

It’s a paradise, for a certain personality type. Trixie half-reaches over his shoulder for the crossbar of his lyre, as if he has time to sprawl by one of the many streams cross-cutting the earth to pluck out some bucolic tune and probe the darkest bruises of his nostalgia. Not now. He readjusts the strap and keeps moving. He used to carry his quiver of arrows across his back, but he swapped it for the lyre some time ago. Seems to him more monsters can be tamed by those strings than the single one on his bow. Still, he hits the next footfall hard on his left side, feels the gentle nudge of his knife’s hilt against his hip, right where it’s meant to be. 

There’s a lion. It isn’t there, and then it is, golden and massive, its mane a thundercloud around its beautiful, solemn face, blocking his path. Trixie freezes in place. He knows not to blink, to keep his head low, to look it in the eyes. The lion regards him like stone. “Hello,” he says, loudly and firmly. “Look, I’m not here for you. Can I pass? Please, I hate killing things that don’t really mean it when they come for my throat.”

This isn’t supposed to work. Trixie is stunned when the lion pads closer, nuzzles his hands, butts its massive head against his belly. “Oh, hi,” he says, softer. “Hi, pretty.” The lion opens its mouth and takes Trixie’s whole hand inside it. He braces himself, but the lion doesn’t bite down. He feels its hot breath puff around his fingers, its teeth holding him firm and harmless as they might a cub. “Okay,” he says. He takes his free hand and slowly raises it before the lion’s face to run his fingers through its mane. It doesn’t just let him - it rumbles, nearly purrs, amber eyes placid as the dawn. 

“I know this is a long shot,” Trixie tells the lion softly, “but I’m looking for some friends of mine, and it’s gonna be dark soon. I don’t have fabulous night-vision eyes like you do. You seen any people around here who look like me?”

The lion nuzzles him again. If it understands him, it doesn’t let on. Gingerly, Trixie removes his hand from its mouth. “Thanks anyway,” he says. “I gotta go.” He moves past it, watching over his shoulder in case it changes his mind and decides to attack. Instead, it goes for a nearby stream, flopping down to drink like Trixie was never there at all. It’s almost insulting, to be considered such a non-threat. He snorts and forges ahead, splitting his focus between the smoke in the sky, when he can glimpse it through the thick canopy of trees, and the flora beneath his feet. Stepping on some favored larkspur or everlasting is a surefire way to get metamorphosed. He treads lightly. 

It’s nearly sundown by the time he gets to the witch’s house. It’s small, stone, nestled in a tangled grove of fig trees and crawling with ivy. The door is rough-hewn wood. Driftwood, by the look of it. He thinks of his ship, waiting safely for him on the shore. Assuming it’s not, like, enchanted now. He knocks. 

He waits. Smoke still billows from the chimney. There’s a deer there, beside him as sudden and silent as the lion had been. “Hey,” he says to it. “Is she ignoring me?” 

The deer’s little ears point and twist on its head. Trixie knocks again, louder this time, with the side of his fist. “Witch!” he yells. “This is stupid! Let me in!” 

The door swings open so hard and fast that Trixie nearly falls over the threshold. “Well, excuse me,” says the witch mildly. “I happened to be in the back garden. I’m very busy, you know, I live a full life.” She fixes him with a blinding smile. “Hi,” she says. “You can call me Katya.”

Her voice is warm, a blanket falling across his shoulders. The deer tries to shove past Trixie to get at her, put its face in her hand. “Hi,” Trixie says flatly. He’s never perfected the art of a gentle greeting like she has - the syllable cracks into the air like frost. The deer sniffs and takes off skipping into the woods. Trixie is, again, slightly affronted by the behavior of a woodland creature. “So listen,” he says to the witch. 

“I’m, you know what, this is so rude of me, I don’t know what’s come over me,” she says, throwing the door open wide. “I’m just getting dinner started. You wanna come in and keep me company?” 

Trixie bites the inside of his cheek. “I’m not hungry,” he says. Her eyes are bright even in the fading light, pale in hue. She’s fairer than he expected and tall for a woman, almost as tall as he is. Her hair’s yellow, long and falling in waves down almost to her waist. She doesn’t look like an evil witch. Of course that’s how Trixie knows that’s exactly what she is.

“Who said I’m making enough for two?” Katya scoffs. She turns on her heel and pads inside, her bare feet making soft, familiar sounds on the stone floor. “You travelers are all so presumptuous. I mean, really.”

“Listen,” Trixie says again, following her inside. “I know who you are, and I know you’ve done something to my crew.” 

Katya blinks at him. “Nobody’s been here for ages. It’s just you.” Her robe, some intricately-patterned and soft-looking fabric held together with a long rope at her waist, slips off one shoulder, showing a flash of milky skin. She glances down at it, then back up into his face. “Oops. You ever get lonely, sailor?”

“Come on,” Trixie says. 

“I know I do.” The door swings closed at Trixie’s back. The room glows red and gold, candlelight shimmering off the swaths of fabric she’s draped over every wall. From outside the house looks small, but the room is grand, perfumed and warm and taken up primarily by a bed bigger and more inviting than any Trixie’s seen in actual, literal years. Katya’s robe drifts further down her arm. Trixie’s eyes go to her collarbone, her throat, back up to her hungry expression. “I get so lonely I can’t stand it,” she whispers, drawing closer.

“You’re embarrassing yourself,” Trixie says. “I mean, you look killer, though, nothing personal. Where’s my crew, witch?” 

“Oh, well, I’m mortified,” the witch says. She pulls her robe back into place, huffing. “Boy, you sure are a tough nut to crack, aren’t you?” She busies herself with her belt, her hair falling over her face. Trixie rolls his eyes. “You can’t blame a girl for trying,” Katya sighs. She combs her hair back from her face and gives him a grin. Trixie takes a step back. 

“What did you do,” he says stupidly. “You changed, you’re different.” 

“I don’t know what you mean,” the witch says, and he - _he_ \- fusses with his robe, shakes his long hair out, bats his big eyes. “I’m _different?_ ”

“You’re, don’t do that, don’t do the robe thing,” Trixie says. 

“What robe thing?” The witch does the robe thing. This time, when the fabric slips down his shoulder, the arm he bares is muscular where it was slender moments ago, and, alarmingly, adorned with thick black tattoos. His skin flickers with patterns in the candlelight. The sun setting through the window melts his long hair into gold. Trixie knows he’s staring. The witch does, too. “You like them?” he asks quietly. “I have a few more I can show you, in some pretty adventurous places.” 

“Stop it.” Trixie gestures at Katya’s face, his body. “Which is real?” 

Katya blinks again. “It’s all real,” he says. “Everything is.” He nods his chin in Trixie’s direction. “How about you, sailor? You got any tattoos?” He folds his arms over his chest, leans back against the wall, looking Trixie up and down, twice the lion the one in the forest was. Trixie’s blood sizzles in his ears. 

“Gods! Give it a rest,” he says, rolling his eyes. “Is this supposed to freak me out? Am I supposed to be scared of you?” 

“I can’t fathom why you would be,” Katya says. He looks like he’s trying not to laugh. A bird lights on the far window, taps its little beak on the sill. Katya holds out his hand, not breaking Trixie’s gaze, and the bird flutters right inside, landing on Katya’s wrist in a tiny storm of wingbeats. Trixie’s lips tighten. 

“I know who you are, all right?” Trixie says. He shifts his balance. Knife, lyre, sachet of holy herbs, wineskin. He marks them mentally on his body, makes a sundial of himself, tells time by the tools he carries. 

Katya strokes the bird’s tiny head. “Oooh.” He’s mocking him, his eyes bright with laughter. Trixie knows calm is the deadliest weapon in his arsenal, but it’s one of the few he hasn’t mastered. 

“Yeah,” he goes on, “and your whole thing isn’t gonna work on me.” 

_“Oooooh!”_ He waggles his fingers in the air. The bird flaps up, haloes him, lands in her hair like a jewel. She’s a woman again. “Not my _whole thing!”_

Trixie reaches behind him for the door, yanks it hard. Of course it doesn’t open. Knife, lyre, herbs, wineskin. “Sorry,” Katya says, “did you have somewhere to be? Am I boring you?” 

“Listen up, witch,” Trixie spits. Katya shells a hand behind her ear and makes a big show of leaning in. For just a second, her face transforms again, going round and smooth as a baby’s, and Trixie can’t keep himself from recoiling. She flickers back into the elegant planes of her female face. If he weren’t well-versed in this kind of nonsense, she’d have succeeded in making him think he imagined it. “I’m favored,” he goes on. “I’m blessed.” He undoes the sachet from his belt with one hand, holds it up before her. 

She glances down at it, but doesn’t react otherwise. She seems much more interested in his face. “Oh, yeah? Congratulations. How exciting for you.” He watches her scan him. Holding out the sachet pulls back his cloak, exposing his knife. She sees it, her grin a blade of its own. “You are a tricksy one, aren’t you,” she coos. “Wow.” 

Trixie’s ears heat. “You know who I am,” he realizes slowly. 

He’d outsmarted one sea witch one time, found himself with this nickname that follows him from port to port and across every league of the sea. Not that he cares what he’s called, what’s known about him. It feels as true as any name he’s ever carried. He feels no more affinity for the one he was born with than he does the teeth he lost as a child. 

Katya’s face shifts again. Trixie digs his nails into his palm so he won’t move. Katya’s eyes go serious and dark, his nose drawing up and out, his cheekbones softening, his brows thickening. “Is that supposed to be me?” Trixie asks in his flattest voice, the one that can wither flowers where they grow and make lesser gods think him their equal. 

“You’re something of a legend yourself,” Katya says, undaunted, out of Trixie’s own mouth. Trixie doesn’t know how long it’s been since he’s seen his own face anywhere other than in the shifting reflection of a stream, or glimpsed, twisted, in the bevel of his knife. “A very minor legend,” Katya goes on. “A skinny one.” 

“Put your face back,” Trixie says. “Looking at my own isn’t putting me in a better mood. Though the long hair is becoming on me, I’ll admit.” He rubs his palm over his shaved head instinctively. 

The bird lifts itself into the air, weaving between them. As it passes, Trixie’s blinded for an instant by its wings. “Hey - “ He shoos it away as carefully as he can, and it lands on his own shoulder. “Excuse me,” he says, trying to sound stern. Katya’s face is her own again. The bird pecks gently at Trixie’s earlobe. 

“Drink some tea with me, Trixie one,” Katya says. “You like tea, don’t you?”

“I’m not drinking anything you give me, witch, I’m not stupid.”

She nods sagely, turning her back on him and crossing to the far side of the room, where there’s suddenly a hearth and a table and two chairs. “Well, that sounds boring,” she says, blowing her hair out of her face with a loud, dramatic noise. “So come on, you go first. What do you know about me?” 

Trixie slowly lowers the sachet, feeling vaguely ridiculous in his battle stance. “You make shit,” he says. “You’re crafty.”

Katya puts a hand over her heart, all honored and overjoyed. “Thank you!” She settles at the table and kicks out the other chair for Trixie. He lowers himself into it, eyes on her. There are two mugs on the table. Katya drinks deeply from one. “Listen, Trixie, not to, you know, blow my own horn here, but this is some _very_ good tea,” she says. “I have a little colony of bees back there who are so generous with their honey…”

Trixie pulls out his wineskin and takes a long, pointed swig. “You did something to my crew,” he says, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. “Where are they?”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” says Katya. Her features broaden, chisel into their male form. He smiles at Trixie, his eyes crinkling up with amusement. “Honest.” Trixie clenches his teeth. The bird twitters quietly in his ear, rubbing its soft, feathered head against his cheek. “Look, he likes you,” Katya coos. “I think you’ve found yourself a new first mate.” 

“Okay - “ Trixie grabs his knife and drives it, in one sharp motion, into the wood of the table. Only Katya’s eyes move, following the arc of Trixie’s arm, the restrained quiver of the knife standing at attention when it sinks in. “So you’ve heard of me, right?” he hisses. “You have any _idea_ how long I’ve been out here on the sea? On this never-ending quest? You think you’re the first pretty enchantress I’ve come across?” 

“Why, _Trixie,_ you think I’m pretty?” Katya gasps, fluffing his hair. He throws his head back and laughs in delight, a caw that sends the bird fluttering into the air in alarm. Trixie wants to flip the whole table, but his knife’s still stuck in it, inconveniently. 

“I am not the one, _honey,_ ” Trixie says. He digs into his pouch of herbs and plucks out a handful of white flowers, holding them out before the witch’s face. “Look.” 

The last few rays of sunlight burning through the window catch the blooms, shoot them through with arrows of divine glow. Trixie holds them there in the dying light, marveling at the effect despite himself. Katya looks. Elbows on the table, face smushed in his hands, brow furrowed in concentration, he looks like nothing so much as a child waiting to be excused from dinner. “And what’s this supposed to be?” he asks, after a moment. 

“You know what this is,” Trixie says, rolling his eyes. “It’s moly. It means you can’t fuck with me. It means whatever you did to them isn’t gonna work on me. Sorry.” 

Katya reaches forward with one finger outstretched. Trixie holds it fast, in case the witch tries to grab it, but takes care not to crush its delicate petals in his fist. “How’d you get this?” Katya asks, not taking his eyes off the plant. “Humans can’t harvest these.” He traces his finger gently over its hardy stem, its sinister black roots. “Who gave you this, Trixie?” 

Every time the witch says his name, Trixie feels it, a notch carved in the wall of his belly, the gentle rocking of the sea of him. It’s some trick. “Hermes,” he says.

Katya laughs through his nose. He looks up from the flower to meet Trixie’s gaze. “Very fancy. He your patron? The one who _favors_ you?” 

“No,” Trixie shoots back, vaguely affronted. “Athena.” 

Katya makes a retching noise, lolling out his tongue. “Oh, _stars,_ not her! She is such a cunt.” 

The room goes black. There’s a howling wind, a tremendous clap of thunder. Birds in the nearby trees shriek, take flight in a susurrus of alarm. Trixie flinches hard despite himself, penitence already shaking in his knees. He fights the impulse to fling himself to the floor. Katya cackles, high and shrill, like the witch he is.

“You _are_ a cunt!” he screams up at the ceiling, his hair whipping all around his face. “Girl, I’m sorry! It’s _true!”_

“Stop!” Trixie hisses. Lightning streaks the sky. Any minute, the house will be torn to shreds in the storm. Katya calmly rises from the table, goes to the hearth, stokes the fire. 

“Baby, you keep on like that and you’re gonna ruin your loyal slave’s nice little boat,” he calls. Trixie bites on his tongue. “Gonna smash it to bits out on the rocks. You don’t want to do that, do you?” 

The storm subsides. Petulantly. The sky clears, but the shutters of Katya’s house keep slamming in a crude rhythm long after the wind’s stopped - _fuck you, fuck you, fuck you._ He goes over to the window and holds them open by force until they calm down. 

“Trixie, look,” Katya says cheerfully. Trixie hasn’t moved. 

“I’m not Her slave,” he says. His voice tumbles out unevenly, like it’s fallen out of his mouth and down a short flight of stairs. 

“Uh-huh. _Look,_ Trixie.” Katya waves his hands in the air around them. Dust motes whirl past his fingers, glinting in the last rays of bright orange sun. It’s the same lovely, quiet evening it was before. “See how neither of us got struck down dead? You notice that?” He sweeps his hair to one side. There are more tattoos on his long neck, trailing up behind one slightly pointed ear. He lets out a long, relaxed breath and then puts both hands on the table, leaning close into Trixie’s space. “You wanna know why that is?” Trixie says nothing. Katya grins. He eases a single sprig of the moly from Trixie’s clenched fist before he gets the sense to stop him. “Because none of _their_ shit means anything here. You got it? This is _my_ house.” 

Trixie watches him slip the moly between his lips and chew. Before Katya can do anything else, Trixie eats another sprig himself and pockets the rest. Katya grins. 

“ _Athena._ What’s so great about wisdom, anyway?” he asks, jerking his head up toward the heavens. “Being stupid is a lot more fun.” 

“You’re, like, fully insane, aren’t you?” Trixie says. Katya shrieks again, and Trixie, both exhausted and shocked, feels a laugh bubble up under his tongue, too. He lets it out, carefully.

“Look, sailor, I spend a lot of time alone.” He sighs again, then goes to the back window again. Now it’s a door. He flings it open, revealing a lush garden, loud with cricket song and bright with fireflies. “C’mon. You’ve had your little, y’know, inoculation aperitif. Have dinner with me. I can’t hurt you now, and you can’t hurt me.” He shows Trixie his hands. They have long, pointed nails, and then they don’t again. “I’m not gonna do anything messed up. I promise. I’ll even let you help, if you want. You can watch me the whole time.” 

The moly’s left a tingling, peppery taste in Trixie’s mouth. “There’s no reason at all for me to trust you,” he says.

“No, totally, but like, what else do you have going on?” Katya points out. He pads barefoot into the garden. “Come on, Trixie,” he calls. “You like animals, don’t you? I’ll introduce you to my pigs.”

***

In the back garden, Trixie watches the witch gather massive, colorful vegetables into a basket. After a while, she shoves it into his hands, complaining it’s growing too heavy. Birds, deer, rabbits, tame and friendly as dogs, flock around them as they go. 

He doesn’t know what makes him realize. Maybe it’s the way the pigs, when he and Katya arrive at their pen, squeal like hell at the sight of him. “That’s so funny,” Katya says, raising her voice to be heard. “They’ve been so quiet and well-behaved. Something must’ve set them off.” Maybe it’s the way her eyes glitter when she says it. The basket slips from his hands, sending the harvest scattering. 

“Change them back,” he says, trying to keep his voice level over the noise of the pigs. He reaches for his knife, realizing a moment too late it’s still stuck in the witch’s wooden table. Katya cracks up. 

“Oh, you are too cute,” she wheezes. “You’re all - “ She makes her eyes comically wide, miming reaching for an imaginary knife on her own belt, coming up empty with a theatrical aw-shucks shrug. 

“Change them back or I’ll kill you!” he yells. So much for level. One of the massive spotted hogs has escaped its enclosure and comes to root at his feet, snuffling around his sandals, like it means to comfort him. Katya reaches down, laying an affectionate hand over the crown of its head. He smacks her hand away from the creature, and she snatches it back with a shrill, delighted giggle. His vision is going red at the edges, rage and humiliation, as if he’s stepped into a well-laid but obvious trap. Katya wipes at her eyes with her other hand. 

“With what?” she giggles. “Your holy flowers? Your super-special dagger?” 

“With my super-special bare hands,” Trixie growls, lunging at her throat. Katya moves past him in a whirl of soft fabric and hair, grabs his wrists out of the air and bends one up and back behind him hard. Trixie bites down on his cheek so he doesn’t make a sound. 

“You wouldn’t hit a _lady,_ would you?” she whispers in his ear. He lets out a long, even breath. His muscles scream. If he moves she’ll break his arm. “In front of her _babies?_ ” 

He doesn’t do anything. He waits, breathes sense back into his brain. He’s been stupid, short-tempered off lack of sleep and hunger and wine, off riddles and monsters and the endless bellow of the sea. Off penitence, contrition, sacrifice. He’d been warned the witch was dangerous. He didn’t realize her true power. Only now does he see that he, too, is transforming into a beast. 

“I don’t want to hurt you, I don’t,” Trixie rasps. “I don’t wanna hurt anybody.”

Katya releases him, shoves him lightly away with a hand at Trixie’s spine. Trixie stares at the ground until he feels steady enough to show his face, then turns to face the witch. “I’m not changing them back,” he says. He’s shifted again, Trixie realizes. This close, in the silver moonlight, Trixie can see the prickle of stubble on his jaw. “But I’m not going to change you, either.” His lips are parted. He’s breathing a little heavily, too. Trixie maybe had him, for a second, more than he realized. Katya grins at being caught. “I think it’d be more trouble than it’s worth. You’re kind of a pain in the ass, Trixie, anybody ever mention that to you?” 

Trixie laughs, stunned. Katya drops to the ground, starts gathering up his fallen vegetables. One of the pigs rolls him a cabbage with its snout. He makes a high, pleased sound and strokes its cheek. “Thank you,” he tells it sincerely. 

Trixie looks at the pig. It’s quiet, now. They all are. They seem calm, tails flicking, snorting softly as they root around in their pen. “Look, at least, do you have to keep them penned up?” he asks. Slowly, he gets to his knees beside the witch and helps him, collecting scattered peas and spring onions and depositing them back into the basket. “They were sailors pretty recently.”

Katya nods at the pen. “Gate’s open. See? They like it in there. They can go wherever they want.” The pig has nestled its head happily against Katya’s knees. He pets it absently as he speaks, laughing a little. “I know what you were told, honey, but I’m not a total monster.” Trixie nods. He can still taste the moly in the back of his throat. Katya tucks his hair behind one ear and eases the beast’s head off his lap. “If you promise not to try to murder me again, I’ll make you food,” he says. “You won’t win, anyway, and I could really use a dinner companion who walks upright.” 

He glances up despite himself, like Athena might be sitting in a nearby tree, shaking Her head in disapproval. But there’s nothing up there but the last few crimson clouds and the same stars he tracks every night on the ship. Katya gets to his feet and slings the basket up his forearm, then sticks out his other hand for Trixie. “Come on,” he says. “I heard tell you bested some sirens some time back. I wanna hear that story.” Trixie lets the witch tug him to his feet, bring him in close. He drops his hand, pulls back sharply into his own gravity. Katya, oblivious, turns back toward the house, plucking an herb here and a flower there, chattering over his shoulder. “Someone started a vicious, slanderous rumor a while back that I was a siren. Excuse me! Imagine that! _I_ don’t even like music, actually! And I can’t sing for shit…” 

“With a laugh like yours? I’m shocked,” Trixie says. Katya bats at him like a biting fly, letting out another wild cackle. Trixie flushes, invisible under the forgiving eye of the moon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> more very, very soon. feel free to scream at me here, or be a nerd about greek mythology with me on [tumblr](https://stutter8.tumblr.com). your feedback genuinely means the world to me, and puts kindling on the fire of my motivation. hope you enjoyed!


	2. goddess of the hearth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You know what happens if you give in to me?” Katya asks quietly. “If you come under my, like, my _thrall?”_ Trixie shakes his head. Katya shakes his right back at him. He laughs silently, a sweet puff of air over Trixie’s cheek. “Yeah, me neither. Wanna find out?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> to beanie, who is generous and kind beyond measure, and seems to conjure endless time to listen to me and soothe my anxieties and beta this thing as if by actual magic. thank you, my love. i am very, very lucky.

The little stone house opens up into a wide, warm kitchen. The bed’s gone, replaced with several tall shelves of herbs, dried fish, oats, loaves of bread. Katya shrugs cheerfully, almost sheepishly, like, _what are you gonna do?_ “I don’t care much for food, honestly,” she says - she’s shivered back into her female form, Trixie notices, almost as an afterthought - “but you must be starving.” 

Trixie lifts a shoulder. “There’s barley on the ship.” 

“Oh, wow, there’s _barley_ ,” Katya gasps. “I stand corrected.” She goes to a hanging basket by the window. “Here.” She rises onto her toes and then comes toward him with a bunch of grapes, fat and nearly black in the dim light. “How long’s it been since you’ve had any of these?”

Trixie looks at her sideways. “Why?” 

“Because I poisoned them, and I want to make sure you’re not gonna notice until it’s too late,” she says, rolling her eyes. “Stars, I can’t do a damn thing to you, all right? You ate your little flower.” Trixie stares at her. “Is it so hard to believe that I might just be a good hostess?” she asks lightly. 

“Yes,” he says at once. It makes her laugh. Still, he tugs a grape free from the bunch in her hands. The compass in his gut holds steady; he trusts her words. Despite everything. “All right. I mean, thank you,” he says, and pops the grape into his mouth. It bursts on his tongue, bright and loud and liquid. “Fuck,” he says. His eyes must roll back. Her whole face splits in an ebullient grin. 

“I know,” she says. She eats one, too, talking through a mouthful of juice. “They’re _good_ this time of year.” Trixie nods, working his tongue over his teeth. That single taste was almost beyond belief, almost magic itself. “No, go ahead, help yourself,” Katya urges. “There’s plenty more out back.” 

“You don’t mind?” He’s already chewing two more. Katya shakes her head. She looks like she’s trying hard not to giggle, and Trixie narrows his eyes at her. “Stop it!”

“No, please, I’m not - it’s just nice,” she says. “I can’t imagine. Have whatever you want.” 

“And they’re not enchanted?” Not that it matters. Not that he wouldn’t happily resign himself to a life as a pig or a bird or something with a hundred legs for just a few more grapes. It’d be worth it, honestly. 

“Mm-mm.” Katya shakes her head again. She deposits the whole bunch into Trixie’s fingers, carefully, like she’s trying to pour water from her hands to his. “I mean, a little bit just to help them grow. But I promise, they’re not going to do anything but taste good.”

He sinks down into a chair, his back to the wall, watching her. She moves from shelf to shelf, collecting things, bread and hard cheese and spices. “It’s just getting cold enough for stew to taste good, don’t you think?” she says over her shoulder. She glances back at him and laughs again. “All right, Trixie, don’t eat the _stems!”_ Off his mortified look, she waves a hand. “I’m teasing you,” she says. “Here, is that knife you stabbed into my nice table any good for peeling?”

He’d almost forgotten. His eyes go for it but only land on the grain of the wood. It’s not in the table, not in its scabbard on his belt. She’s taken it from him. His stomach lurches with the absence of it. “It’s good for all kinds of things,” he says carefully. “I do need to be holding it, though.” 

“Hmm.” In a bright flash, she’s pulling it from a fold of her robe, brandishing it at him. He brings his hands up, but she doesn’t attack. “This little number a gift from Her?” she asks instead, nodding toward it and then at the pin on his tunic, a finely-wrought gold owl. “Your big mean girlfriend with the war helmet?”

Trixie opens his mouth, offended on Athena’s behalf, but stops himself, feeling ridiculous. Katya’s grinning, ready to laugh at him some more. Her smile only grows wider when she realizes he won’t be baited. He raises an eyebrow at her. “You want my help or don’t you?” he drawls.

“Oh, please, I don’t need no man,” she scoffs, then turns back into one. He sets the knife on the table, hilt towards Trixie, then turns his back and goes to the hearth.

Trixie takes it immediately. Its familiar weight in his hand is a comfort. He watches Katya, how he twists his long gold cascade of hair into a knot at the nape of his neck, away from the flame. Trixie could throw the knife easily and stick it straight through the back of Katya’s hand while he’s occupied, he could get silently to his feet and drive it between Katya’s shoulder blades. He could twist Katya’s arm back, couldn’t he, hold him close against his body and demand Katya fix his crew, drive the tip of the knife under that stupid pointy ear and stop him from laughing at him any more - 

He lunges for an onion from the basket and slices off both ends, chops it in half and strips away the skin in a few sharp movements. His eyes start prickling immediately. Katya turns at the sound, his hands still stuck in the nest of his hair. 

“You could’ve cleaned it first,” he says primly. Trixie shoves away onion tears with the heel of his hand. 

“You could turn my crew back into human people,” he says, “but I guess nobody’s perfect, huh?” 

He blows out a sharp blast of air, grabbing his chest like he’s been mortally wounded. Trixie clutches his knife tighter, like it might suddenly shriek out all his murderous impulses. “Listen, honey,” says Katya, snatching the onion and pulling its layers apart with his long fingers, dropping them one by one into the pot he’s got boiling over the hearth, “I’d change ‘em back, but they don’t want me to.” 

“I’m not your honey.” Trixie grabs another vegetable, a carrot, and starts peeling it so aggressively it snaps in half and takes twice as long to finish. “Did they tell you that? Do you speak pig, on top of everything else?” 

Katya performs a long, pointed snort. Trixie rolls his eyes. “Why do you think all the animals that live here are so happy?” Katya asks. He pulls a wooden spoon from nowhere and starts to stir. Trixie doesn’t answer, just chops the carrot into pieces and scoops them up in his hands. He goes to the hearth with them, his shoulder nearly brushing Katya’s. He stares into the pot, which is already fragrant and bubbling happily away. “Go ahead,” Katya says, nodding at the pot. Trixie drops in the carrots. When Katya turns toward him, his face is bright and dancing with flame. “You’re not the only one on that ship, hero,” he says quietly. “It ever occur to you that it might get pretty old, being a supporting player in somebody else’s never-ending quest?”

“Oh, please,” says Trixie. A storm cloud gathers across his brain. Guilt brews in his belly. Katya dips his spoon, blows on it, sips the broth. 

“What do you think?” he asks, dipping again. 

“I think I haven’t survived this long by worrying about whether everybody else is homesick,” Trixie bites, before he realizes what Katya means. He’s brought the spoon up to Trixie’s mouth, his other hand hovering beneath to catch anything that spills. “Oh.”

“Blow first,” Katya says, smiling. “It’s hot.” 

“Shut up.” Trixie doesn’t know where to look. Not into Katya’s eyes, just inches from his own. Not at his grinning mouth, nor at his ear, nor at the wisp of hair that’s fallen out of the knot and into his face. He closes his eyes and tastes. 

When he opens them again, Katya’s staring at him, eyes serious and wide. “What’s the verdict?” he asks. “Like I said, I’m not much of a cook, so.” 

“No, it’s good,” Trixie says, stepping back into the relative cool of the rest of the room. “Just maybe needs a little more time.” Katya nods, bowing his head over the pot.

The minutes pass quietly. Trixie’s heart clambers up into his throat. “You know, like, I don’t really care if they like it,” he tells his hands. “I need my crew back.” 

“Well, in the morning, when they wake up, you can tell them that,” Katya says with a sigh. “But for now, I believe we’ve reached what is known as an impasse. So let’s have what is known as supper. Yeah?”

He pulls wooden bowls and spoons from a shelf beside the hearth and ladles out a portion of stew into one. “Hot, watch yourself,” he says, placing it on the table with a thud. He fills his own bowl, sits opposite Trixie with it, and immediately starts to eat.

Trixie’s used to thanking the gods before a meal. Digging right in feels impolite, if not mildly sacrilegious, but drawing their attention on Katya’s island has yielded pretty subpar results thus far. _This is my house,_ he’d said. Trixie can at the very least follow his rules. He lowers his head and eats. 

He stifles a moan. Badly. Katya glances up, looking pleased. “Good?” she asks.

“You said you weren’t a cook.” He had manners, once, but now he can barely stop eating to speak. “This doesn’t taste like it.”

“Well, I’m also a liar,” she says, shrugging one shoulder. Her mouth is a long red curve, shining in the faint light. “There’s plenty more, way more than I can finish. Help yourself.” 

He does take another portion, feeling a little embarrassed, trying not to eat so fast the second time. He can feel her eyes on him. “What?” he demands, his spoon loose in his fingers.

She’s got her chin in her hand, watching him intently. “Whose slave are you, then? If you’re not Hers?”

Trixie snorts. He goes back to his bowl, scraping up the last bits. “I’m not.”

“But your hair…” She gestures to his shaven head. 

“And you wouldn’t know anything about disguises, would you?” Trixie says flatly. Katya’s mouth falls open. 

“This is not a disguise,” she says, frowning. 

“Like, am I supposed to announce to everyone who I am? With a reputation like mine?” Trixie asks. “And, anyway, it’s pretty interesting, the way people treat you when they think you’re a captive, a criminal, in disgrace…”

“Excuse you.” She rises, gets a rag from a hook by the hearth and starts wiping out the insides of their bowls. “I never once implied you were in disgrace. I just wanted to know who you belonged to.”

“I don’t.” Trixie watches her hands, feeling useless. “Myself.” 

“Or the ocean, or whatever,” she adds helpfully. She gestures for his spoon, which he hands her. “You could say that, Trixie, it sounds a lot nicer.”

He snorts. “Right,” he agrees. “The ocean, or whatever.” She nods, satisfied, while she continues her work. “Why don’t you use magic?” he asks her. “If I had magic, I wouldn’t be cleaning my own dishes, that’s for damn sure.” 

“Who needs magic when you’ve got an extra pair of hands?” she asks, throwing the soiled rag at his face. He splutters, catching it clumsily out of the air like it’s a living, squirming creature. “There’s a little stream back there, you can hear it from the door,” she says, pointing toward the back garden. “Go be a lamb and clean that for me, will you? Not - oh, not an _actual lamb,_ Trixie, don’t give me that face!” She throws her head back and laughs. 

He gets up fast, knocking over his chair in the process, which just makes her laugh harder. “Shut up,” he hisses again. “You really are, like, I just, I really think I hate you.” 

“I know, baby, I’m just _awful,”_ she giggles. “Go on. The sooner you go, the sooner we can have dessert.” 

His spirits lift at that, a tiny bit, but he’s not about to let her see. He takes off, grumbling, out the back door, leaving her soft wheezing laughter behind him. 

The stream isn’t far. He follows the sound past a tangle of pea vines, past the night-blooming jasmine he smelled all the way across the island. He kneels in the mud and does the witch’s cleaning, letting his eyes grow tender and wide in the night air.

When he returns, he’s only mildly surprised to see the room’s transformed again. The hearth is gone, and the table. Now, they’re in a sitting room. There’s a long couch and a chair, a low table, lots of candles casting everything in bronzed light. Katya’s perched on the edge of the couch, drizzling honey from a small jar over a few figs. 

“I told you,” she says, glancing up at him, like their conversation never stopped. “Dessert!”

“From your generous bees?” Trixie settles in the chair opposite her. She tracks him with her eyes, then looks back down at the plate before her. A tiny line appears between her eyebrows. 

“They’re not people, if that’s what you’re implying,” she says. “They’re just friendly. And they do nothing all day but gorge themselves on my clover until they’re delirious. They don’t even notice when I take it, they just kinda…” She flops out her tongue, crosses her eyes, waves faintly at an unseen passerby. Trixie lets out a high peal of laughter that shocks both of them. Katya shrieks, delighted. 

“Never criticize my laugh again,” she says, jabbing her honey wand toward him. “I’m gonna remember that next time you come for me. What kind of strange bird _are_ you, anyway?”

“Go away.” A fat droplet of honey pearls on the end of the wand, and Trixie, not thinking, leans in close and swipes it up with his thumb. Katya’s eyes brighten in surprise. “I,” Trixie says, his hand halfway to his mouth, embarrassed, “I’m.”

“I don’t care,” Katya says. “I mean, I want you to. Go ahead.” 

“Why?” Trixie demands. His neck is hot. Outside, there’s no sound at all but the quiet murmur of the brook, a few crickets. It’s night, real deep night. 

Katya groans through her teeth. “What do you mean, ‘why?’ Are we really still doing this?”

“You’re just waiting for me to let my guard down,” Trixie accuses, shrinking back. His whole body is fox-tensed, the little hairs he can never catch with his razor pricked up on the back of his neck. The honey slinks down his thumb. “I know what you’re doing,” he hisses, “you can still, you can still - _unman_ me - “

“Unman you?” Katya’s face draws in sharply. Her mouth still smiles, but her eyes are blades. “That’s what you were told, huh? _Unman_ you? Oh, please.” He just stares at her, unmoving. “Oh, come on, Trixie, please,” she says.

“I was told a lot of stuff.” Where is his knife? Where’s the moly? How often is he supposed to keep eating it, like, has it worn off? Has he failed?

“Don’t drip on my couch,” Katya says, raking back a few pieces of her long hair. “Then I’ll _actually_ kill you. What did they tell you, huh? _Unman_ you. C’mon, what did they say? Was it all true?”

Trixie feels ashamed, suddenly, at the exhaustion on her face. “I was told you lived in a palace,” he says. 

“Well, do I?” She gestures around at the stone walls, the single room with the couch and the little table.

“You do,” Trixie shoots back. He sounds stubborn, a child losing an argument. “I mean, a kind of, like, I mean, how many rooms have you got hidden in this place?”

She leans across the table, slowly, her feet planted wide and flat on the floor. Even knowing all she contains, it’s strange to see a woman move the way she does, command so much space, arrange herself like a king. “As many as I need. What else were you told?” she asks.

“Stay back,” he tells her. 

“Uh-huh.” She shifts, broadening. His hand wraps around Trixie’s wrist. Trixie watches Katya’s lips part, watches him suck Trixie’s thumb into his mouth. Katya’s eyes bat closed. His tongue works over Trixie’s thumb like he means to swallow the whorls of Trixie’s fingerprints along with the honey. There’s a low cry in Trixie’s toes at the feeling; he curls them against it.

“I was told you’d tempt me with a feast.” It’s supposed to be sharp, an accusation, but his voice comes out soft, dusked purple. Katya sucks, and Trixie hears his breath go out in a rush that lifts the hair off Katya’s forehead. He pulls off him, his lips red and wet. 

“And how am I supposed to know what you like?” Katya asks. He drops Trixie’s hand, gets to his feet, comes to stand between his spread legs. Trixie stares up at him. Knife, herbs, lyre, wineskin. They’re all somewhere. Somewhere, he knows that. Katya reaches down, honey-slow, and wraps his hand around Trixie’s throat. “How should I know what you’re hungry for?” he says softly. Trixie’s hand comes up, closes around Katya’s wrist. “Your knife’s right there,” Katya breathes, like he’s read his mind. “Go ahead, Trixie. You can stop me.” 

Trixie blinks up at him. Katya smiles. His hair tumbles loose from its knot, finally, pouring down over his shoulders. 

“That’s the thing about the gods,” he says with a sigh. His thumb strokes a gentle arc against Trixie’s jaw. “They’re so literal. No room for ambiguity at all.” 

Trixie gets shakily to his feet. Katya’s hand is still tight around his throat. He can breathe, but every inhale has Katya in it, the force of his grip. His eyes are steady on Trixie’s. He’s not smiling, for once, but he doesn’t look fierce. “You know what happens if you give in to me?” Katya asks quietly. “If you come under my, like, my _thrall?”_ Trixie shakes his head. Katya shakes his right back at him. He laughs silently, a sweet puff of air over Trixie’s cheek. “Yeah, me neither. Wanna find out?”

Trixie throws his arms around Katya and drags him in close, sucks the honey off his tongue. Katya makes a quiet noise into his mouth, squeezes Trixie’s throat tighter. He bites him, tears at the pin on Trixie’s cloak. His _cloak,_ he’s still wearing - he pulls back, lets the thing fall from his shoulders, pushes Katya away to get his lyre over his head and set it down as carefully as he can on the chair, his hands trembling.

“You don’t want me to change, do you,” Katya says. His voice is low, all breath. Trixie shakes his head. Katya’s mouth splits into a wicked grin. “Should I have you just like this, sailor?” he asks. “With your fuckin’ sandals still on?” 

“Who says _you’re_ having _me_ at all?” Trixie snaps. Katya’s on him in a second, taking him by the throat again and whirling him around so his back hits the wall. The air goes out of him, straight into Katya’s open mouth. Trixie’s hands flutter up, lighting on Katya’s arms, his face, his hair. 

“You’re right,” Katya says. He presses in harder. Trixie’s mouth falls open. A little wheeze squeaks out of him, and Katya’s mouth twitches up into a faint grin. “You can have me, if you want, if you like that better.” He presses himself against Trixie. He can feel every inch of him through the airy fabric of his robe. He works a leg between Trixie’s, grinning when Trixie ruts, unthinking, against it. “You just have to say so,” Katya says. “Just tell me what you want the most.” 

Trixie grits his teeth. He can barely move, pinned as he is by Katya’s body, his hand clutched still around his throat. “Come on,” he grits out. 

“Tell me,” Katya says. He kisses Trixie’s gasping mouth again. “It’s okay, it’s not bad if you say it.” 

“You know what I want,” Trixie mumbles against him. His pulse pounds in his tongue. He breathes in as deeply as he can, gets a mouthful of Katya’s hair, blows it out again. “Come _on._ ” 

“It doesn’t make you weak, you know.” Katya loosens his grip so he can take Trixie’s face in both hands, trace his features with his thumbs. Being held by him so tenderly is foreign, excruciating. His eyes boil. “I know how people talk, like, I get it, but it isn’t shameful to me, that you might want to be something other than the captain, the commander, like, once a decade or so - “ 

Trixie’s head nearly smashes back against the wall, but Katya’s faster, gets a hand behind his skull to hold him close, keep him steady. His lips purse like he means to shush him, but he makes no sound. He slips his other hand down between them, under Trixie’s clothes, and takes him in his fist. Trixie’s eyes shoot wide. “All right, you cunt, yes,” he hisses. “Please. Fine. I want you to - _have_ me, yes. Please. Fuck. Fuck you.” 

Katya crushes him against the wall, kissing him hard, and Trixie opens up to him. He closes his eyes, feels Katya reach over to the side of him without breaking the kiss, then straighten up again. He feels soft breath on his shoulder, his collarbone, then the warm touch of oil slicked between his thighs. “Like this, right?” Katya whispers. “This is how the boys do it on all those lonely nights in the encampment? Out at sea?” 

Trixie’s eyes snap open. “You think you know so much,” he hisses. Katya laughs softly, undeterred, working with one hand to untie the belt around his own waist. “Fuck’s sake, just let me,” Trixie mutters, parting the robe. Katya leans in again, covering Trixie’s body with his own.

“Thank you, Trixie,” he murmurs. Almost despite himself, Trixie closes the distance this time, leaning in for another kiss. When they break apart, Katya’s eyes are giddy. “I’m gonna unman you so good,” he says, laughing his woodpecker laugh against Trixie’s mouth. “Might let you unman me right back, if you behave.” 

The candlelight all seems to dim out at once, and in the darkness everything gets sharper, louder. Trixie’s senses dissolve into the scratch of the stone wall at his back; Katya’s hot skin, slick with sweat, against every part of him not covered by his own clothes. He hears his own voice coming out in high, choked-off moans. Katya holds him close, thrusts against him, scatters little bites and kisses across his throat, his jaw. “Just like that for me, exactly,” Katya’s whispering, “there, that’s perfect,” even though Trixie’s not doing anything at all, just letting him, head thrown back, feeling him, the heat and friction of him. It’s immediate, or the sun is rising, when Katya jerks hard and groans, long and low, into Trixie’s neck. He finishes him with a few final quick twists of his fingers, smothers him with another kiss. Trixie makes no sound, just holds him tight and feels it all. It’s been too long. It’s maybe never been like that. 

“Fall right here,” Katya murmurs, eventually, and Trixie doesn’t understand until Katya tugs him forward, taking him off balance. He braces himself for a hard landing on the floor, wincing, until he and Katya hit something soft and bounce. The room’s changed again. He’s staring up at the ceiling from the oversized bed he’d glimpsed earlier. They’re melting into the blankets, a small ocean of soft sheepskin and wool. Katya’s hair cascades over both their faces, and then he’s kissing Trixie again, and Trixie’s eyes close into it. “I’m taking these off,” Katya tells him after a moment, pulling back. 

Trixie says nothing, just catches his breath and watches. Katya pulls Trixie’s feet into his lap and works off one sandal, then the other, and tosses them away. “There.” He undoes the pin on his tunic, too, and carefully peels it away from Trixie’s body. As he does, his robe slips off his own shoulders and puddles at his waist. Trixie lifts up onto his forearms, staring. 

He’s inked all the way up and down his arms, tattooed with symbols, shapes, language - some words Trixie recognizes, a lot he doesn’t. There are crude drawings of flowers, plants, animals. They spiral and creep over his ribs, disappearing down his hips. “What is all this?” Trixie reaches out, but doesn’t touch.

Katya shrugs. “Some do their casting with a staff. I have these.” He cocks his head to one side, drawing his hair over one shoulder and starting to loosely braid it. “Do they scare you?”

Trixie scoffs. “Don’t be stupid.” 

“Just try and stop me.” Katya winks at him, actually winks, as he braids. Trixie drops back onto his back, covering his eyes with one hand. 

“I was told…” he murmurs, turning his face down into a pillow. He can feel Katya shifting beside him, jostling around, wriggling out of his robes and slipping beneath the covers. 

“Uh-huh.” He tugs at them until Trixie, annoyed, gets under them too. “What were you told, Trixie.” 

He sighs into the pillow. Sleep is close, now, a dark shadow folding over him. “You’d try to enslave me,” he mutters, opening one eye. Katya glances over at him, his mouth twisting up in a grin. 

“Yeah? How’d I do?” He leans forward and kisses Trixie’s bald head, just above his right ear. “You mine now?” 

“Fuck you.” Trixie shoves him, and Katya whistles out a laugh. “In the morning, you’re changing my crew back, and I’m getting the fuck off this island.” 

“Uh-huh.” Katya rolls him over and smacks a loud kiss directly on his lips. Trixie swats him away, grumbling, which cracks him up some more. “Sure thing,” he says, when he catches his breath. “Ask me in the morning, and maybe we can work something out.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> did i study a lot of urns and texts learning that intercrural sex was basically ancient greek gay missionary? SURE I DID and i regret NONE OF THAT TIME SPENT
> 
> your feedback on this has been incredibly thoughtful and gratifying so far - like, way beyond what i thought i could have for this weird, out-of-left-field AU. i would absolutely love to know what you thought, hear your theories, receive your criticism about my butchering of homer - anything at all! i am not historically good about commenting in a timely fashion, but i've been really trying to be good this time around. it all means the world to me.


	3. god of flight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He takes a wide, sloppy swing at him, but Katya, cawing with wild laughter, sprints away from him up the path. 
> 
> Trixie’s on his heels, taller and with longer legs, his bare feet flinging off a cloud of sand with every step, but Katya knows the way better and banks hard into the grass to avoid being caught. “Come on, Trixie, don’t you wanna _muuurder_ me?” he sing-songs over his shoulder.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> playlist [here.](https://www.tinyurl.com/stuttersail) endless thanks to [beanie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/beanierose/pseuds/beanierose) for the love, the support, the beta work, and everything else you do. and thanks to literally everyone reading this - i'm so, so glad to have you aboard.

It’s dawn when Trixie wakes, pale violet light shooting in slivers through the back window and the cracks in the door. It takes his body a few moments to catch up with his mind - he’s swaying in place as he sits up, everything liquid in him anticipating the sea. He finds his tunic crumpled by the bed and fumbles back into it, fastening it in place after a brief hunt for the pin on the floor. He finds his belt, too, heavy with his tools. He checks the pouches - the knife, secure; the wineskin, half-full from his last drink; the herbs still safe in their watertight sachet. Most of what he carries in there has dried out by now, but the moly still looks fresh-plucked, the white flowers juicy and pulsing with life. 

His mind is clear and calm as a brook, all his dreams lost and forgotten the way they only ever are after a night of too much wine. He feels good. He’s immediately suspicious.

The back door is gone, just a stone wall with a single window again. The witch has trapped him here. He remembers yesterday how he pulled and pulled at the front door and couldn’t open it. She’s underestimated his strength, then. Fine. He goes to the front door, readies himself, takes a deep breath, and jerks. 

He stumbles back and lands on the floor in a heap, the driftwood door crashing on top of him, torn from its hinges. Just a normal door. Could he have checked that first? Like, _sure_. He clambers to his feet, looking around, face hot. 

A deer peers in the gaping hole in the house at him. “Oh, please, you would have done the same thing,” he tells it. “I mean, what were you before she got a hold of you, an oarsman? A soldier? Wouldn’t you want to get out with your hands and feet intact?”

The deer flicks its tail and bounds off into the trees. Trixie, slightly abashed, lets himself out, resting the door gingerly against the frame. 

The sun’s not properly risen yet, just a bright question asked far off in the eastern corner of the sky. Katya is nowhere in sight. He rounds the house in the dim light, wanders through the back garden toward the sound of the sea.

The grass grows high out here, half again as tall as Trixie. There’s a winding path to follow, beaten out by one narrow pair of feet. Trixie traces the witch’s steps, moving slow, the grass rustling and whispering on all sides. Out ahead, there’s the hush of water. The path opens up to a sandy white beach, the churn and sigh of low tide. A flash of red and gold passes over Trixie’s sight and he stops mid-step, catching himself on one foot. He crouches, slinks silently into the grass, and watches through the stalks.

Katya’s gliding along the shore, turning in careful circles, moving her hands to form shapes in the air, almost dancing. She’s speaking, low and steady, in a language Trixie can’t understand, doesn’t recognize. After a long moment of this, she leaps into the air and scatters into a flock of birds. Trixie clenches his teeth to stop them chattering. 

The flock of her circles the beach, shrieking to itself. One bird breaks away and flings itself higher than the rest, straight up into the bruised sky. The others, flapping madly and screaming, spiral after it. The air is still this morning, calm, little movement but for the breeze picked up from her many wings. The first bird cries out, flying higher and higher, and then, like a dropped toy, plummets straight down to earth, landing on the sand with an ugly thud. Trixie watches, stunned, as the rest fall all around the first, as swift and sudden as a hail of arrows. 

Then she’s lying there, a woman again, sprawled long and graceless on the shore. Trixie watches for a while, unsure. It feels like there should be a protocol for what to do in such a situation, but he’s got nothing. Is she dead? Did he, technically, in some way… defeat her? And who the fuck is going to turn his crew back into people now? He’s staring, helplessly, when her body jerks and she sits straight up, gasping, shaking her hair off her face. Trixie topples over in a shocked heap, flattening himself into the grass. 

She rolls over onto her hands and knees, catlike, and drops her head down between her shoulders. Trixie takes the opportunity to crawl back onto the path and get to his feet, rustling loudly like he’s just wandered down here.

Katya springs up at the sound, quick and alert as a goat. “Well, good morning,” she calls out to him, smiling broadly. “Sleep okay, sailor?” 

“I want my crew back,” he yells back. She juts out her lower lip, puts her hands on her hips, stomps her foot in the wet sand, mocking him. “You said,” he goes on, ignoring this, “in the morning, we could work something out.” 

“I said _maybe,_ ” she corrects him. She paws her hair back behind one ear and approaches. She’s moving light and easy, like she wasn’t just a couple dozen dead birds on the beach. If she suspects Trixie saw it happen, she says nothing. Before he can stop her, she pulls him in close around the waist and nibbles the tip of his nose. “Hey - _hey!”_ He bats her away, sputtering. She doubles over with a cackle, and when he rises he’s changed again. 

“Sorry, you like this better, don’t you,” he giggles. “Lemme take that one again.” This time, he takes Trixie’s hand and tugs him tight against his body. 

“Don’t you fucking dare,” Trixie hisses, but he’s still shocked into a shriek when Katya buries his face in his neck and blows a raspberry there. “Fuck _you!”_ Trixie shrills, shoving him away. He takes a wide, sloppy swing at him, but Katya, cawing with wild laughter, sprints away from him up the path. 

Trixie’s on his heels, taller and with longer legs, his bare feet flinging off a cloud of sand with every step, but Katya knows the way better and banks hard into the grass to avoid being caught. “Come on, Trixie, don’t you wanna _muuurder_ me?” he sing-songs over his shoulder. Birds dive into the air as Katya crashes through the greenery, into the thicker, denser part of the forest. 

Trixie knows he’s being baited, can smell his own blood in the air all around them, but he can’t make himself care. He’s as awake with speed as he ever felt with Hermes at his back, his feet light and swift as he follows the waving flag of long yellow hair through the woods, always just out of reach. Then suddenly, it slips from his vision, and there’s a shriek and a loud splash. 

Trixie skids to a halt, breathing hard. He’s stopped at the very edge of a lush, dark pool in the middle of the woods. Katya’s treading water, her shoulders and wet gold hair a strange, bright lilypad in the center. Trixie sees her abandoned robe crumpled by the water’s edge, at his feet. “Get in here,” she calls to him. “You reek. Like some awful brute of a man spilled his seed all over you last night.” 

The sun’s rising now, red-pink, mimicking Trixie’s flush. He looks down at his toes in the mud, out at Katya’s narrow, grinning face. “Is it enchanted?” he demands. “What’s going to happen to me if I go in there with you?” 

“You’ll get wet,” she says, dipping under the water and then emerging again, spitting a little fountain toward him. “You should try it sometime. It’s fun. Trixie, on my fucking honor, nothing’s gonna happen to you. Eat another fancy flower, if you’re so worried.” 

One of the island’s many does ambles close. “Good morning to you,” Katya says, waving, sending droplets out in all directions. Just beneath the surface, Trixie can see a flash of her skin, but the water renders her invisible from her sternum down. The doe lowers her head to the water and drinks. Nothing happens to her. Katya gives the deer, then Trixie, a pointed look.

“All right,” Trixie says. His skin is tight and too warm; the thought of sinking into the chilly waters of a natural spring nearly makes him shudder with yearning. “I’ll wait for you to finish,” he says, turning his face away. 

“Don’t be stupid. You need me to change? Will that soothe your, like, your sense of propriety?” She disappears under the water and emerges in his male form. “You know it’s all the same, right?” 

“No, I don’t care, do whatever you want,” Trixie snaps, embarrassed for no reason. He fumbles out of his tunic, throws the pin to the ground, and leaps in. 

The water envelops him, deeper even than he’d realized, and cold enough to take his breath away. He emerges, gasping, near the center, Katya just a few feet away. She’s taken his words to heart and shifted female again. “Oh, gods,” Trixie pants, throwing his head back and laughing from the sheer exhilaration of it. He feels alive in a way he hasn’t in months. Katya twirls in the water, grinning.

“It’s nice, right?” She disappears under the surface and reemerges right beside him, kicking up her feet and knocking her head back to float. In the dark of the pool, she is nothing but long neck, soft tendrils of hair, a sloping mouth, pale breasts breaking the surface. Her bright eyes open, find him watching her. He panics, embarrassed at being caught, and goes under again, like he just urgently needed to rinse his face, suddenly. He can hear her muffled laugh above his head. He stays down, stubbornly, until his lungs start to burst and he needs the air. 

When he breaches the surface, breathing hard, she’s upright again, and looking straight at him. “I’m not trying to freak you out,” she says, rolling her eyes. “There’s just less of me to scrub this way.”

“I know,” says Trixie, who doesn’t know at all. He swims toward the edge and hoists himself up, looking for his tunic. It’s on the other side. Of course it is. He throws his head back and walks along the perimeter of the pool, feeling her eyes on him the whole way. 

“You wanna wash that?” she says, swimming over to him in a few long, graceful strokes. “Mine could use it too, probably.” She plants her hands on the edge of the pool and pulls herself up, comes to stand beside him. He keeps his eyes trained on her face, which makes her laugh some more. “You are _cute,_ ” she says. “You really are Athena’s, aren’t you? You’re _pure._ ” She pulls her hair over either shoulder, covering her breasts, and waves her arms, _ta-da!_

“Maybe I’m just not into you,” Trixie says, dropping to a crouch by the water’s edge. He gathers his tunic up and dunks it into the water, focuses on rubbing the cloth between his hands. “That ever occur to you?”

“Interesting,” Katya says mildly, still smiling. “No, it never did.” She settles beside him on her knees and starts to clean her robe. Their shoulders brush as she swirls the garment in the water. Her skin is warmer even than the sultry air. His spine prickles. “Are you hungry?” she asks after a while. “There are a couple of egg-laying hens about somewhere. No, before you ask, they’re not people, either, they’re just birds. I’ve seen a cock around here every once in a while, too, but sometimes it just disappears without warning - ”

“Okay, listen,” Trixie says loudly. Katya stops talking at once, sits up primly, gives him her full attention. He pulls his tunic dripping from the water and wrings it out in quick, aggressive jerks. “Stop. Stop fucking around. Stop being _friendly._ Stop giving me food, stop teasing, stop treating me like I _belong_ here. You stole my crew. I want -” He drops the tunic, drags his hand down over his face, takes a deep breath. “I am trying to get home.”

She fixes him with a serious look, every trace of smile gone from her face. “All right, honey,” she says. Her voice is low and sincere. “Let’s go talk to your crew, then.” 

\---

“Come on!” Trixie yells again. “Are you fucking kidding me?” The pigs, huddled together in the far corner of their pen, squeal at him in an ear-splitting, defiant chorus.

“I told you,” Katya says with a long-suffering sigh, turning on his heel and heading back toward the house. “They don’t want to go with you. They want to stay here.” 

“I don’t care what you want!” Trixie bellows over their noise. “We have a voyage, we have a mission, we - the Goddess said - don’t you want to get _home?”_

Trixie doesn’t speak pig, but the general tone of their squealing, pointed and aggressive, is well-enough understood. “Well, then, fine,” he growls. “I’ll have him cook you and eat you, one by one, and I’ll get home some other way.” 

“I’m not gonna eat you, don’t listen to him,” Katya calls out. “That’s no way to get along with your neighbors, Trixie, are you crazy?” The door in the back of his house reappears, and he slips inside. 

Trixie buries a scream in his hands. He leans into the pen, nostrils filling with animal smell. “You have families, some of you,” he says lowly. “You have lives. Don’t you?” 

The pigs grow quiet. One of them, mottled grey and massive, trots forward. Trixie stares into its hollow black eyes, looking for something he recognizes. For one strange, suspended moment, he believes the pig will open its mouth and speak. Instead, it drops into the mud and wriggles onto its back, kicking its hooves giddily in the air. “So then what am I supposed to do?” Trixie asks. The pig rights itself with some effort and saunters past him, ramping up to a heavy gallop and high-tailing it into the woods. 

“Hey, Trixie?” Katya yells, hanging off the lintel, leaning her body out into the garden. “Did you perchance break my fucking door down this morning when you left the house?”

He turns from her back to the pigs. They all look at him blankly, like, _well, did you, bitch?_ “It was a mistake,” he shouts back. He can see Katya’s long-suffering expression from here. “I’ll fix it, alright? _Gods._ ” To his crew, quieter, he says, “We’ll put a pin in this. Happy? Enjoy your slop.” 

Katya drops her weight onto one foot and folds her arms across her chest. Trixie huffs. His tunic’s still soaked, dripping down his legs and onto his bare feet, as he trudges toward her. Up at the house, Katya’s taken off her wet robe and changed to one of deep purple, and her hair is starting to dry in soft, loose waves. She looks half-divine herself, a queen of an imaginary country. Trixie glances back at the pen, at the beasts that were once his crew, now milling around in the mud, exploring the tree line with their snouts. He looks back at Katya, who’s waiting for him in the doorframe, her eyes inscrutable on his. 

“Shouldn’t take too long with both of us,” she says, lifting one shoulder, and then she steps aside to let him in.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm @stutter8 on tumblr if you'd like to yell with me there. comments truly keep me going, and if i haven't yet responded to yours, i'm so sorry, i promise i'm getting right on it. i read them over and over again and treasure them so much. thank you endlessly for reading!


	4. god of mending

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Don’t be jealous of Her,” Trixie scoffs. He takes a fistful of Katya’s hair at the root, by the base of his neck, and pulls hard. Katya’s head snaps back as she groans, exposing her long, smooth throat. Trixie starts in surprise. He’s close to her, her chest level with his mouth. He drops his hand from her hair like it’s a wasp that might sting.
> 
> “Sorry, all right, sorry,” Katya says, flickering male again. “I’m right here, honey.” His robe comes loose in the shift, falling open. Trixie lifts a hand and places it over Katya’s bare chest. The witch laughs through his nose and fixes him with an amused look. “What?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you thank you thank you for reading! we're starting to really groove now. the playlist is still [here](https://www.tinyurl.com/stuttersail) if you'd like to do some additional grooving. [beanie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/beanierose/pseuds/beanierose) is a wonderful beta, a marvelous friend, and an all-around ray of light. if i were a witch and i were going to transmogrify her into some animal, it'd be a really nice one, like a deer or a raccoon, something that makes a quiet home in the forest and brings wonder to all.

Trixie knows even his body is mutable. Even flesh is a deal that can be struck, an oath sworn between the gods and those who live on the earth that can be broken at any time. People change, sure. Into flowers, trees, birds, pigs. And the gods don’t need magic to do it, don’t need spellwork. What they will, is. Every day that he wakes up with his skin unfurred, with fingers and toes instead of branches or fronds or scales or spindly spider legs, is a gift, is reason for praise. Especially now. 

Katya’s swinging the door back and forth on its hinges, pumping his hips in time to its squeaks, panting like a feral dog. “Stop it,” Trixie says, pointedly looking away from the shape of his lean body moving under his robe. “You’ll break it right off again.”

“I don’t think I will,” Katya says, gliding across the floor and settling over Trixie’s thighs. Trixie is sitting at the kitchen table, cracking open chestnuts with the flat of his knife, which he puts down and shoves away. There’s a fire in the hearth, and Trixie’s face, already bright with it, goes hotter. “It’s lasted this long, hasn’t it?” he points out. “How many weeks?”

“Three,” Trixie says. “Wait, shit, like, six?” 

Katya shrugs, pushes his body down against Trixie’s, steadying himself with his hands on Trixie’s neck. “You’re good with your hands, sailor,” he says, scooping his hair out of the way and closing his mouth under Trixie’s ear, where his heart beats loud. “That door’s not going nowhere unless you tear it down again.” 

This morning, like most mornings, Trixie had followed the witch down to the beach to watch him work his spells. He shifts into some animal form, or conjures fire or summons a rainstorm above his own head, holds it for a few dazzling moments, and then returns to himself, looking plain and dwarfed by the wide sea and his own magic. At first, Trixie thought he was following Katya to gather intel, but there’s nothing to learn. Lately, he just watches him shift, curious to see what he’ll become next. Today she was a lioness, prowling the shore like it was a pride she could protect and leaving massive, heavy pawprints in her wake. Some mornings, she lies still for a long time, afterward. Other days he shakes it off like a light sleep, comes back to himself, bounds up the path on human legs like nothing’s changed. 

He doesn’t know why he doesn’t just ask Katya about it. It seems private. But if he knows he’s spying on him, he’s never said. He never stops talking; if he wanted Trixie to know, he’d bring it up, surely. Trixie’s got his rites, too, in his way. Even now, looking up into Katya’s heavy-lidded eyes, he touches the pin on his tunic unconsciously, as if Athena might feel it in her temple, however many leagues from here that might be.

Katya pouts. He’s making fun of him again. “Cover your eyes, little bird,” he coos, pulling the delicate gold owl from Trixie’s shoulder and tossing it behind him, where it hits the floor with a heavy clatter.

“Don’t be jealous of Her,” Trixie scoffs. He takes a fistful of Katya’s hair at the root, by the base of his neck, and pulls hard. Katya’s head snaps back as she groans, exposing her long, smooth throat. Trixie starts in surprise. He’s close to her, her chest level with his mouth. He drops his hand from her hair like it’s a wasp that might sting.

“Sorry, all right, sorry,” Katya says, flickering male again. “I’m right here, honey.” His robe comes loose in the shift, falling open. Trixie lifts a hand and places it over Katya’s bare chest. The witch laughs through his nose and fixes him with an amused look. “What?”

“Why’d you change?” he asks. “Just then, when I…”

“I don’t know. Felt right? Not all of us slobber at the altar of Reason, Trix. With all the marvelous places in the world to slobber available.” He leans down, pushes his tongue into Trixie’s mouth with a soft groan. 

Trixie pulls back. Katya twists down into his lap again, mewling. Even now, Trixie can’t always easily tell when Katya’s playing with him, trying to catch him wanting too much, needing too hard. Trixie’s enemies think he’s clever. His enemies don’t know how stupid they are. He’s used to reading the sea, the clouds, watching for color and movement to tell him all he needs to know to get out alive. The red of a stormy morning, the soft white emptiness of midday. Most forces of nature don’t have the will to lie, to play. Most. He places his other hand on Katya’s narrow hip, stares up into his face. “If that’s what you want, if that feels good, I want you to do it.”

Katya looks genuinely thrown. Trixie hides a smile in his neck, breathing in the smell of him. When she shifts, silently, she barely changes. It’s her scent that gives her away. Trixie knows the clouds, the ocean. Violet, white, grey. He knows color and movement. “I didn’t think you liked…” Katya trails off. Trixie sinks his mouth down over her right breast. She’s laughing at him, still, a dark red sound like the flesh of a plum. Daylight lances through the half-open door, through the window, turns her hair almost white. 

“Bring the bed back,” he mumbles. She’s twisting in his lap, trying to navigate their clothes, and she snorts at this, shakes her head. 

“Too much to do today,” she sighs. “I know how lazy you get, baby, I’m not losing that body to the nearest flat surface.” Her robe parts and falls. He can feel every inch of her. He sucks at her nipple, keeps his red face against her chest. She doesn’t need any more reason to tease him. “No, yeah, right here, I’m gonna take you right here,” she tells him breathlessly. “That a problem for you?”

“I don’t know, I mean, if we’re _that_ busy,” he starts, rolling his eyes, and then she lifts herself and draws him inside her and he can’t do anything but crane up for her mouth and kiss her. Color, movement. She is a force. 

“Go ahead,” she tells him, when he thinks he’ll die of trying to hold still, of just letting her move over him, and so he does. Then, “Do this,” taking his hand from her hip and showing where, how she wants him to touch, and so he does, he does, finally wrenching a long, shocked sound from her, her skin flooding with color, her legs twitching around his. Then a brief losing battle, surrender, and then the howl of the ocean in his ears. He holds her close, nuzzles his face into her breasts. “Fuck,” she says, then caws with laughter. “Trixie, oh, _fuck!_ ”

He’s still catching his breath as she lifts off of him, shaking out her hair and settling back on his lap for another kiss. Trixie doesn’t even realize he’s changed again until he feels the soft scrape of stubble on his cheek. Trixie lets him kiss him until his legs start to fuzz with sleep, then he shoves him off, grumbling, and melts back in his chair. Katya goes to the ground without complaint, rolling and stretching as he sometimes does post-transformation. “You play dumb like that for your wife?” Katya asks. Trixie glances down at him. His robes are still in disarray, inked skin flashing into view as he twists his body this way and that. “Sneak attack her like that, pretend you don’t know what you’re doing, and then…” He trails off, rolling his eyes back, sticking out his tongue. Trixie snorts. “Or is that special for me?” 

Trixie sees the gold glint of his pin on the floor and gestures for it. Katya follows with his eyes but doesn’t move. “My, sorry,” Trixie says flatly, “my _wife?”_

“You must have a wife back there.” Katya jerks his head vaguely in the direction of his ship on the southern shore, as if Trixie’s whole life, his past, has been floating in the cove for these months. 

“Oh, come on.” He holds out his hand. Katya flops onto his stomach, makes a show of straining for the pin, just beyond his fingertips, and then collapses, panting, on his face.

“I dunno, you’re a pious man, aren’t you? All the pious men have wives,” he says. Trixie, holding his tunic in place with his fingers, stomps up and crosses the floor to get the damn thing himself. 

“Not - _hey!_ Not this one,” Trixie grits out. Katya’s grabbed his ankle as he passes. He shakes himself free. Katya laughs like an asp.

“Doesn’t She want you to get married?” Katya rolls to a sitting position, indicating the golden owl in Trixie’s hand. “Don’t tell me She’s never given you the hard sell on some pretty nymph, some king’s eldest daughter…” 

Trixie fiddles with the pin. The tunic is new; Katya, some time back, seeing how threadbare the clothes he came in were becoming, wove him one on a giant loom he produced in a corner of the room when Trixie wasn’t looking. It’s softer than any cloth he’s ever worn, the weave fine as a spiderweb, and it shines faintly silver under moonlight. He often catches himself running it between his fingers absently when there’s no work to be done. Katya catches him, too, but only ever looks away and smiles. “Hard sells aren’t really Her thing,” Trixie says. “Anyway, where’s _your_ wife?” 

Katya cackles, rising to his feet. “I _am_ my wife,” he says, bending his back for another stretch. “And I’m not pious.” He goes to the back wall and pushes until it becomes a door, opens it so that bright, cool air floods in. “Come on, come bathe with me.” Glancing at Trixie over his shoulder, he shakes his robe off all the way and pads naked into the back garden, starting toward the lake in the woods. “Don’t look at me like that,” he calls back to him. “What, you’re worried the neighbors are gonna see?”

Trixie rolls his eyes. “I’m more worried that _I_ have to look at you,” he yells at the crude spirals and leaves tattooed on Katya’s shoulders. Katya waggles his hips in Trixie’s general direction like one of his friendly bees, laughing to himself. Trixie, mouth dry, follows him down the path. 

The days are getting cooler now, too, a little flash of teeth in the air around them. Before long, the ground will be too hard to work, so their days are full, harvesting and preserving and working the land. Always something to do, some way to keep busy as they pass the time. Katya’s forever pointing out some new herb she can use for her spells for them to harvest, some delicious fish that only swims this way for four days out of this very month that they must drop everything and catch at once. Sure, sure, his crew, the ship, but first, is he really so cruel as to leave her with her fence unmended? Surely he wouldn't want to leave before trying this rare fruit that only grows on this island this exact time of year. Would he? And the pigs are ecstatic, anyway, happily spending their time wandering all over the island, digging up the mushrooms that have begun sprouting by every tree in the forest, rolling in the fresh patches of mud from the rainstorms that now sweep in off the sea almost every evening. Katya and Trixie built a new enclosure for them over a few days from driftwood and a couple of trees felled in a big storm. They might not be on his ship anymore, but they’re still his crew. 

“Hey,” Katya says, when they reach the edge of the pool. A plover startles out of a tree at the sound of his voice, only to flutter lower and perch in his hair, staring down imperiously at Trixie with its beetle-black eyes. “Oh, hi,” Katya adds warmly, tilting his head up to acknowledge his new hat, before looking back at Trixie again. “I want a kiss.” 

“We can’t always get what we want,” Trixie says, rolling his eyes as he leans in. Katya wraps his arms around Trixie, cooing, and then throws them both forward hard so they flail into the lake. Trixie lets out a scream as they smash down that is snatched away by the frigid water’s clutch, and then the world goes slippery, dark, a shout of its own into his ears. 

Katya’s body, woven against his, is warm. Trixie holds him tight, eyes shot open with cold. Underwater, everything moves slowly, the tangle of Katya’s hair around them a soft yellow cloud in the faint sunlight that follows them down. Katya’s crushing his mouth against Trixie’s in an airless kiss, tiny jewels of breath floating up all around them. The water takes them down a little ways, then bears them up to the surface like it always does. Trixie has faith in that, above all else. He can always ride the water back up into the sun. Katya burns hot all around him, even as his fingers and toes sting with cold.

“I hate you,” Trixie gasps, still wrapped up in Katya, who laughs, raking her hair out of both their faces. Their kicking legs twine as they tread water. “I hate you,” he says again, between kisses, on her tongue. “I hate you,” he tells her, softly, when they finally break apart. She’s fighting a smile; he knows from the tightness in her eyes. Instead, she dips forward and turns a somersault in the water, swims down, pops up on the other side of the pool. 

“Well, I love that for you,” she calls out to him, catching her breath. She takes a fistful of the flowers that grow by the lake and works them into suds in the water. Trixie watches her shoulders slope, watches the way her mouth knits with focus as she rubs the petals between her hands. “You know,” she says, working the foam through her hair, “if you liked that, back there, up at the house, we can do it again anytime.” He changes abruptly. “And I can do it to you, too,” he offers. 

Trixie cackles. “Uh...no you cannot,” he informs him. “Not all of us can change form at will, like…” 

“It’s not quite the same, no,” Katya interrupts loudly, rolling his eyes, “but… it’s nice.” He dunks his head, and a cloud of bubbles rises from his hair. When he reappears, he’s close enough to draw Trixie in by the hips again. Trixie runs his thumbs over the raised lines of the bees carved into his collarbones. “Not that those thighs of yours don’t drive me fucking wild, but there’s a a lot more we can do. You might like it,” Katya says, then laughs. “Knowing you, actually, you’ll like it too much and I’ll never get you out of bed again.”

Trixie pushes away, realizing what he means, puts a little distance between them. “You can’t - we couldn’t,” he stammers. He starts paddling back toward the shore. 

Katya’s still laughing. Trixie dips under the water, too warm suddenly. “You can do it to me, like this, if you want,” Katya’s calling after him as he emerges. 

“No!” He pushes himself up onto dry land and sits, shivering, in his wet tunic. “Katya, I…” 

“I mean,” he goes on, undeterred, “we stand a much better chance of you not knocking me up by mistake if I’m like this, but I guess you like a little danger, don’tcha, Trixie?” 

“I wouldn’t degrade you that way,” Trixie snaps, and then immediately feels stupid. Katya’s eyes shock wide, and then disappear into wicked slits as he leers at him. 

“Degrade me?” he echoes. He throws his head back and moans so loud that it echoes through the trees. “Trix, I wish you would. I wish you would!”

“You’re making fun of me.” He does it all the time. Trixie’s throat and shoulders get tight. 

Katya swims to him and clambers up on the shore. He plants a muddy knee on either side of Trixie and angles his face up for a kiss, but Trixie dodges, glowering. “It doesn’t degrade me,” he says. He’s not laughing now. His pale eyes are serious on Trixie’s. “They really do tell you such awful things, don’t they? It doesn’t.” Trixie says nothing, only cuts his eyes away. When he glances back up, Katya looks a little angry, actually. “To hold my head up? To like what I like? Is that meant to degrade me? And why does it only degrade me in this shape?” She shifts. “What’s that mean for my body when it’s like this, huh? Nobody seems to worry about degrading _this_ body. Why do you suppose that is, Trixie? Why do you think treating _that_ body like this one is so shameful?”

“Stop it. Get off me.” Katya doesn’t, so Trixie grabs her wrist and squeezes his thumb into the hollow until she jerks it away. It does the trick. With a wounded look, she gets to her feet and stomps away. Trixie leaps up, too, mad at himself for being cruel and at Katya for not letting him forget it. “Oh, come on, Katya. Come on! I didn’t make the world, I - and it’s different for you, you’re not -” He clutches at his owl. “I don’t expect you to understand how the gods are, you’re - “

“Oh, no?” Katya says softly. She whirls to face him. Trixie’s hands tighten into anxious fists at the flint in her eyes. “You got any idea who my father is, Trixie?” She sticks her hand straight up in the air and points to the sky, jutting out one hip. “You wanna say hi to him?”

“What?” Trixie says stupidly. He looks at her hand, her angry face. He squints up. 

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, don’t be an idiot,” she hisses. “Don’t look right at him in his chariot or he’ll blind you. He’s a real laugh riot, my old man.” 

Trixie sits down hard in the dirt. Katya lets out a long sigh, then walks back over and lowers herself down beside him. “I know what the gods are like,” she says.

The breeze picks up. A chill goes through Trixie in his wet clothes, despite the rays of the sun - carried by Katya’s father, apparently, what the _fuck_ \- flirting through the branches of the trees, casting a pantomime of shadow all around them. Katya, who’s still naked, barely seems to notice. She scoots to the edge of the lake and touches the surface. Trixie watches as tiny bright fish swarm around her fingers. When she moves them in the water, they twirl and dive around her hand in a shimmering dance. 

“Look,” Trixie says quietly, “I’m already on one god’s bad side, like, I’m just trying to keep a low profile at this point.” 

Katya laughs, sending the fish scattering. “Hence your quest, right?” 

“It’s not like that.” He gets to his feet, brushing mud and moss from his calves. “I’m freezing. I don’t have god-blood or whatever you’ve got going on, okay? I’m heading back to the house.” 

“Don’t be such a baby,” Katya chides, springing up after him. “What’s it like, then? If it’s not like that. I can’t picture _you_ getting into trouble with a deity.” She knocks into him as he heads back up toward the house in long strides. Any anger she’d been feeling has clearly melted away; her eyes are bright and gleeful at the thought. “Not my good little sailor boy.” 

“Shut up!” Under the irritation is relief. He turns the key in the lock of that knowledge, tucks it out of sight. 

“You better watch your mouth,” Katya purrs. “I’ll tell my daddy on you. I’ll put a curse on you if you’re not careful.”

“My moly says you won’t, witch.” She rolls her eyes right in his face. The herb waits untouched in its pouch. They both know. “It’s - I was on my way home,” he says. “And it’s maybe possible Poseidon overheard me saying something that was _fully_ taken out of context.” 

Katya bounces up the path ahead of him to open the back door. “You mocked a god,” she says, then bursts out laughing. “Party!” 

Trixie peels himself out of his tunic as he crosses the threshold. She’s rearranged the room for them into the antechamber; he hangs the soaked garment on a hook on the wall and shrugs into one of her spare robes beside it, the red one patterned finely with gold leaves. Her eyes travel the length of his body as they dress, her mouth curling up at how the delicate fabric stretches across his broader shoulders. He turns from her and finds the couch there, figs and honey on the low table laid out like an offering. He slumps onto the couch, worn-out from the uphill climb and everything else. “Sure,” he says. “I mocked a god. Badly, and in public. And now no matter what I do, the ocean won’t take me home. And if it’s not the ocean, it’s a cyclops trying to eat my crew. Or sirens with their sharp rocks and illusions.” Katya settles on the far side of the couch and slings her feet up into his lap. He looks at her sideways, and she blinks at him like a doe. “Or some _witch_ who thinks she’s a lot more charming than she is…”

“Oh, please. Trixie,” Katya scoffs. “You really think that’s all it is? What’s waiting for you back there?”

He shoves her feet away. “My duty,” he hisses, “my life, I have…” His hands weave fruitlessly in the air, casting nothing. “I’m not just some sailor, like, I have a crown,” he says. “You know that, don’t you?”

Katya shrieks with her head thrown back, fists pinwheeling through the air. “Oh, she has a _crown!_ ” 

“I was supposed to rule a kingdom at one point,” Trixie says over her. He snatches a fig from the table and crushes it between his teeth. It collapses into jam in his mouth, overripe-sweet. Their season’s ending. “And now…” 

“Honey.” Katya hoists herself up and crawls, pinning his body beneath her. 

“I’m not your honey.” He gets a hand free to swat her hair away from their faces. She snaps her teeth at his fingers softly. 

“If you wanted to get home, really,” she says, “you would’ve figured out a way by now. You’re clever. You’re tricksy. Especially with that grey-eyed crow on your side.” Her nostrils flare; Trixie realizes he’s twisting a lock of her hair tighter and tighter between his fingers and releases it at once, murmuring an apology.

Outside, the trees begin to whisper amongst themselves. It’s raining. More mud for the pigs, more felled branches for all the birds’ nests. The house gets warmer, tighter; the hearth’s lit and crackling. “She won’t talk to me anymore, Katya.” Trixie’s whispering, like he might be heard. Like anybody’s listening. “Since I came here. She’s gone. I’m alone out here.” 

“Probably all my blasphemy, huh? All your impure thoughts? Whoops.” She squirms on top of him, stabbing into him with her sharp hipbones, laughing as Trixie tries to shove her away. “Sorry, sorry. Wrong time. I know.” She disappears behind her hair, reappears shifted. “Look. You’re not alone,” he says. “You’re a hero, aren’t you? Isn’t that the whole, like, isn’t that your whole MO? This is all part of your little quest. This is all part of the story.”

“I wish you wouldn’t do that while we’re, like, mid-conversation,” Trixie grumbles, but Katya goes on, undeterred. 

“Trust me. As soon as you figure out a way to _best_ me, because that’s what heroes do, you’ll be on your way back to your little life, your little kingdom.” Katya smiles at him with all his white teeth showing, then leans in and smacks a kiss between Trixie’s eyes. He screws up his face, shoving him away, and Katya crows with laughter, rolling off of him and springing to his feet.

“But you haven’t bested me yet,” he sing-songs, crossing the room and fetching something from a hook on the far wall. When he turns back, Trixie sits up fast enough that gravity tilts and he has to close his eyes. Katya’s got his lyre. “Here. Play me something.”

Trixie’s holding his hands out for it with a mother’s yearning. “Where’d you put it? I…” 

“Forgot? Don’t sweat it. We’ve been busy,” Katya says with a shrug. “C’mon, play for me.” 

Trixie thinks of the pigs in their pen, their old lives forgotten, glutted on mud and fruit. “Don’t hide it again,” he says. Katya blinks.

“I didn’t mean to,” he says. “Look, in this house, you just have to ask for what you need. Nothing’s hidden. And anyway, nothing really goes away. Anything forgotten can be remembered.” He sits on the rug, folding his hands neatly in his lap. “Go on.” 

Trixie fiddles with the pegs, plucks a few strings, closing his eyes to hear better. Tuning the instrument is as subtle and slow an art as tracking game in a silent forest, as reading an enemy’s face for lies. The sound is rich and gold and balanced; he plays a few chords like that, keeping still. When he opens his eyes again, Katya’s staring at him. “What?” he asks. “You’re just going to sit there while I play? Can’t you sing or do something useful?” 

He wheezes with laughter. “You’ll be glad if I don’t,” he says. He rocks forward onto his hands and knees and crawls closer, settles by Trixie’s feet. “I’m going to listen. And maybe if you’re lucky, and you play really sweet, I’ll thank you later.” 

Trixie registers Katya’s arm looping up to hold him close by the knee, feels his bristly cheek against the outside of his thigh. Desire tugs low in his belly, but there’s time. Trixie hasn’t bested him yet, but he will. There’s time for all things. He glances down at the top of Katya’s head. There’s time. He couldn’t sail today, anyway, not with the rain as it is. He closes his eyes and plays.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> comments sustain me. they really do. if you're liking this, i'd love to hear about it. you can also ask me questions, yell about stuff, or just follow me [on tumblr](https://stutter8.tumblr.com/). thank you so much as always for reading!!


	5. goddess of chaos

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Trixie feels his knife on the thread of her patience and digs, snapping away a few more fibers. “You know, if it’s such a problem, you could always - and I’m just spitballing here - you could let me leave, y’know?” he says. “And then you can go back to not freezing to death by yourself, just like old times.” 
> 
> Katya slams down the crossbar on her loom with a loud, dry sound. “What an interesting and novel proposition!” she says brightly. When he turns to face Trixie, he’s smiling like a shark.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if you're reading this, i love you. that's all. this one is perhaps slightly more explicit than the others, you've been, like, warned. if you're following along with the [playlist](https://www.tinyurl.com/stuttersail), this chapter kinda covers the triad of "Evolve," "A Bloody Morning," and "Exhale," and they're particularly recommended listening. [beanie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/beanierose/pseuds/beanierose) found time in her busy life to look this over for me, and to be exactly as nitpicky as i requested. she is a brutal beta and a very very good friend.

Katya is weaving Trixie a cloak on her loom in the pallid mid-afternoon light. She’s quiet while she works, settled and calm in a way she scarcely seems at any other time. Trixie watches her from the bed, cocooned in layers of fur. 

“I have one already,” he reminds her, scooting closer to the edge of the bed to better track the movement of her hands. “You don’t have to.” 

“I don’t _have_ to do anything,” she says without turning. “I’ve got better things to do than watch you shiver your way through the whole winter in that flimsy little slip.” 

The door croaks on its hinges. Every day, more cold air slips under the cracks, curls around their feet like a lost cat while they sleep. Katya magicked away the back door over a week ago, trapping in the heat from the fire and whatever pale rays of sun can slip through the single small window during the daylight hours that they have, but Trixie still wakes every morning to the tip of his nose numb, his eyes icy in his skull.

Every day, slowly running out of light, of usable hours, Trixie feels the clock draining down. Every day spent working the land or lazing in bed, every earlier sunset, Trixie feels the wood of his ship rot, feels the heavy iron gate of time closing on his chance to set sail. 

“I mean,” Trixie says, swallowing down the anxious slam of his heartbeat, “like, don’t you get cold?”

“Not the same way you do,” Katya says over her shoulder, fussing with a tangle in a warp thread. “It’s not like that for me. Because of the…”

“Your god blood.” Trixie breathes out hot air over his knuckles, draws the fur tighter around his shoulders. This morning there was snow, a silent shriek of it in the air as he went to the well for water. All the pigs huddle close together in their pen now. Winter knocked once with soft knuckles and then battered the whole door down only days later. “I know,” he says. “I haven’t forgotten. It sounds great for you. Sorry for my, like, very inconvenient mortality.” 

He sees her shoulders raise a hair. “I never said that,” she says in a tight voice. “I mean, I’m sorry, honey. It’s never been a problem before.”

Trixie feels his knife on the thread of her patience and digs, snapping away a few more fibers. “You know, if it’s such a problem, you could always - and I’m just spitballing here - you could let me leave, y’know?” he says. “And then you can go back to not freezing to death by yourself, just like old times.” 

Katya slams down the crossbar on her loom with a loud, dry sound. “What an interesting and novel proposition!” she says brightly. When he turns to face Trixie, he’s smiling like a shark. “A really fun suggestion, Trixie. Why don’t you put on your cloak and your little sandals and go chop some more wood for the fire while I think that over?”

“Fuck you.” He tightens the blankets around his shoulders. Katya’s still smiling.

“I thought you didn’t wanna do that,” he says, eyes mockingly wide. “Not gonna degrade me, right?”

Trixie flings off the furs and stomps to the far side of the room, where his old cloak is hanging on a hook. “I said I was sorry about that,” he hisses. “Months ago.”

“Uh-huh.” Katya turns back to the loom now. Trixie watches the movement of his hands as he weaves the spool through again and again. The yarn is moon-dark violet; Katya had Trixie pick it out himself from his collection of rich, regal thread, mostly red and silver and gold. In the moment, he’d felt full to bursting with pride at Katya’s skill, humble gratitude that he should turn his talent toward Trixie. Now the flashy color makes him feel ashamed, overdressed and childish, like a spoiled prince. The cold seeps into his brain, his words. An apology takes shape on the back of his tongue. He swallows it down like bitter wine and ties on his sandals. Katya doesn’t even look at him as he snatches up the axe and shoulders his way out into the frozen air.

Even now, in the first real assault of winter, the island stubbornly retains its beauty. Maybe they were men once, but the tame beasts all answered some interior call and sheltered themselves away for the season, hidden in the many cave dens and pine tree canopies of the forest. He goes to the pig pen and raps his knuckles against the wall he helped build. “Hi, guys,” he calls. “He’s being a real cunt, can I sleep here with you tonight?”

A chorus of indignant squeals erupts from within. Trixie rolls his eyes. “He _is,_ ” he insists. “Fine, forget I said anything. Stay warm, you mutinous dicks.” Anger makes his body tense, a waste of energy that only makes the chill worse. He forces his shoulders to loosen and relax, taking in the weather instead of fighting it, and goes to find a nice tree to murder instead of the witch.

When he gets back to the house, huffing clouds of vapor into the air, she’s rearranged the furniture again: loom, kitchen table and chairs, hearth. “Oh, hi,” she calls over her shoulder as he struggles out of his sandals with clumsy fingers. “You wanna get started on the barley?” Her voice is still coiled tight in her mouth. 

The pot is bubbling away already, so Trixie goes to the shelf where they store the sacks of grain and grabs a few fistfuls, throws them down into the pot. His head, clear enough in the forest, is already fogged again with irritation. The pot simmers and simmers. “The wood’s damp. Trees are all wet from the snow,” he grumbles. He shoves his hands toward the pot. He can feel the flame on his skin, but it’s not enough. 

“Too bad I’m not a witch or something,” Katya says, with the cheer of a bird screaming outside the window well before dawn. “How will we ever manage?”

Trixie says nothing. He stares into the pot. It simmers. Barley slowly belches to the surface and then is dragged down again. He knows he could chop an onion, peel a carrot, make himself useful. Katya knows, too. She weaves. 

“You know,” she says, “deep in the forest, past the green pools, there’s another one, a different pool -”

“Oh, wow,” interrupts Trixie, “the twist of the century, a _different_ pool -“

“And the water,” Katya continues, raising her voice slightly over his, “comes hot from the ground. It’s too much in the warm months, but in the winter it can be really nice.” Trixie says nothing. Katya clears her throat. “I can take you there tomorrow, if you want.” Simmer, simmer. Katya’s crossbar creaks out. Her loom weights chatter against each other like teeth. “Or you can stay here and pout all day like a sullen little bitch,” she says. “Whatever pleases you.”

Trixie throws a chair over. One of the legs breaks off and rolls across the room toward Katya. He’s on his feet in a second, the chair leg clutched in both hands, his knuckles white on the wood. It lets out a dry gasp and then splinters in two in her hands as if it were only a twig. Trixie’s blood rushes, hot at last, to his face. “You know something?” Katya says loudly. “You truly are a pain in the ass, Trixie, and you’re being a real fuckin’ brat.” He drops the broken pieces of wood. Trixie’s eyes follow them as they roll in limp, lopsided circles at Katya’s feet.

“Then _let me go,”_ he grits out. “Get rid of me! Save yourself the trouble.”

Katya throws the door open and flings his hand out toward the dusky island. The chill wind catches his hair and drags it across his face. “Who’s stopping you?” he demands. “Go get in a rowboat and see what your biggest fan Poseidon has in store for you. See if your goddess will give up the silent treatment and offer you Her divine flapping cunt for a sail.” 

“I’ll -“ Trixie’s vision burns red, his hand flying to his scabbard. Katya laughs with a sound like a falling tree. 

“Oh, yeah, gonna stab me in Her honor?” he jeers. “Be my guest. I’ll heal myself just to spite you.” He crosses the room in a few long strides and grabs Trixie’s face in his hands, brings their foreheads and noses together. Trixie thrashes back, but Katya holds him tight, digging into the flesh of his cheeks. “There’s nothing you can do to me that I can’t undo,” he hisses. “You know how good it feels to shift after you plant your seed in me? Knowing I’m killing every bit of you before it’ll ever get a chance to take root?”

Trixie’s eyes burn. He feels a cry rising in his throat, but can make no sound, mute as a caught rabbit. Katya crushes his face even closer. “I’m never changing back those pigs, sailor boy,” he whispers into his mouth. “ _Never._ It’s too late. It’s over.” He shoves him backward, and Trixie topples, legs numb, into the table, sending a bowl of citrons to the floor with a brutal smash. _Athena, Athena,_ Trixie thinks, but if She can hear him at all She turns away. Katya’s eyes glitter. “I’m gonna watch you die here, or I’m gonna watch you die trying to swim home,” he says calmly. Trixie stares at him, open-mouthed. Katya stalks to the other side of the room, fists balled at his sides. 

“Why are you being like this?” Trixie’s voice comes out small and weak. Katya whirls. 

“This is what I’m like,” he snaps. “How else am I supposed to be?” The icy wind is still blowing through the open door. Katya’s eyes cut over to it and then, without another word, he storms out, slamming the door behind him. 

Trixie scrambles up. “Hey. _Hey!_ No!” The door’s stuck shut. He jerks until it comes loose, whining in protest, though by some miracle the hinges hold. “Where are you going?” 

“Oh, fuck off,” Katya yells back at him. “Like you care.” 

What little light remains is grim and hard. There’s a distant rumble, and then rain begins to fall, frozen rain that slices through the air and lands with an angry hiss. Trixie watches Katya disappear down his secret path to the beach. 

_It’s too late_. Trixie stares into the trees, shuddering together in the sleet. His whole body’s trembling. In the northern distance, he hears an animal shriek. Some hidden part of his mind, the one that knows when the wind will change before it happens and where to dodge an enemy’s sword, takes over. He takes off toward the sea at a sprint. 

It’s barely brighter here, even with the sky unobstructed by trees. The dying light paints the side of Katya’s body as he moves across the beach in dizzy, lopsided circles, the moon shining faintly off his hair. With a sharp breath, he bends over backwards, ribboning into a massive eel that slithers gracelessly toward the water. 

The tip of its tail has barely disappeared into the tide before the moon goes dark and a wave crashes up out of nowhere, slamming the creature back down on the shore. Katya writhes back into herself, hacking, robes in disarray. She gets shakily to her feet and starts to pace again, picking up more and more speed until she leaps up and explodes into her flock of seabirds. She flies straight toward the horizon, a dozen shrill voices crying out, before a terrible gust of wind blows the birds back onto the sand where they scatter like leaves. Trixie drops down to his hands and knees so he won’t be knocked over. The birds’ bodies roll lifelessly across the beach, reforming into a single shape, and Katya lies still, chest heaving. 

She flattens herself against the sand. Her hair turns black, hangs wet and slimy around her as she crawls toward the waves. The sky is iron above them, the ocean churning and furious. Trixie doesn’t realize she’s turned into a knot of seaweed until he sees her spread across the surface and float apart. When the water throws her back on the shore again, it takes her a long time to pull herself back together, and her wet hair is still heavy with kelp.

Trixie watches, heart caught in the back of his mouth, as she tries again and again: a giant eagle, a burrowing crab, a bat, a bale of baby turtles. The sea and the sky hurl her back every time, faster and faster. “Please,” she rasps out finally, retching up seawater. Trixie gets to his feet unsteadily. “Come on. Please!”

Another giant wave crests and roars up over her. “Katya,” Trixie calls out, but there’s nothing to do but watch as it pummels her down, smashing her face against the sand, and then retreats like it was never there. 

She curls up, folding her body over her knees. Trixie’s head pounds in sympathy. “Katya,” he says again, voice lost in the sound of the wind and rain. Katya screams. Her skin flashes; she’s shifting forms rapidly, tattoos appearing and disappearing with such dazzling speed that Trixie’s brain struggles to keep up, buckling under the strangeness. The scream breaks into pieces as Katya changes, two voices melding into one awful ragged sound. Trixie staggers toward the witch and scoops him up, pulls her tight against him. It’s like trying to wrap his arms around a hurricane. “It’s okay,” he says, and then, when Katya’s stopped screaming, like it means anything, like it could help, “I’m right here.” 

Katya kicks the sand, flails, struggles, but Trixie holds on tight. She still can’t settle on a form, but the shifts are coming slower now, making it easier to hang on. “I’m sorry,” Trixie says. “I’m so sorry. Your head.”

“No complaints,” Katya gasps. She shifts female and holds it. “Get off me, Trixie.” 

Trixie rests his chin on her shoulder, brushing her soaked hair off her forehead. “You’re trapped here, too,” he says softly. “Aren’t you?”

She struggles weakly against him, but he holds her fast. “Just go back to the house.”

“No, I don’t think so.” Her shoulders heave. He rocks them both slowly. She could transform again, she could break free, he knows it, but she doesn’t. “This is what you do down here in the mornings. You’re trying to escape.”

He can’t see her face to be sure, but she makes a sound almost like a laugh. “You’ve been spying on me, tricksy one.” He says nothing, just holds her. The tide’s going out, the rage of the water getting quieter. “Listen, honey,” Katya says, her voice all rasp and shaking badly, “it’s not your problem or anything, but I’m going to go mad here. Eventually. Like, crazy-crazy.”

“I never knew,” he says. “Katya, I’m so sorry.” 

Her legs kick. “Don’t be such a hero about it,” she mutters. She’s shaking harder now, but she doesn’t shift, doesn’t try to get away. 

“I’m not a hero,” Trixie mumbles into her hair. “Obviously. Come on, can we go get warm?” He nudges her cheek with his nose. It’s hot and wet. He startles back. “Don’t cry,” he says, and then, quickly, “I’m sorry, no. Cry if you want to. I’d cry.”

“I was awful to you,” Katya sniffles, “a _monster,_ I was…”

“I mean, I am kind of a pain in the ass,” Trixie says. She laughs a little. He gently eases her out of his lap and climbs to his feet, holding out both hands for her. She doesn’t need his help, but she takes it anyway. “How long’s it been, just you here?” 

She meets his eyes, then glances away. Her hands move restlessly, pushing back her hair, straightening her robe, readjusting her belt. “I am a little bit older than I look,” she says slowly. She starts toward the house, and he follows behind, thinking. 

“Well,” he says finally, “like, that’s really saying something, because…”

A shocked cackle cracks out of her into the air. Trixie bites down on a smile. “Shut up!” she shrieks at him, whirling around and lashing her hands in his direction. He dodges, taking off at a run toward the house, her weak laughter following him all the way there. 

The room’s a mess, splintered wood and shards of pottery and citrons scattered across the floor. The pot’s overflowed into the fire, the barley ruined and congealing down its sides. Trixie, tingling with shame, goes to find a rag, but Katya waves her hand weakly. “Tomorrow,” she says. “I’m not hungry.” 

Trixie nods. “I can make tea,” he offers. Katya shrugs. She pulls at her belt and lets her soaked robe fall into a puddle at her feet. Trixie turns to retrieve the kettle, and when he looks back, the bed stands where the loom had been. Katya’s already crawling into it, disappearing under the blankets. 

Trixie’s soaked to the skin, too, but he carefully sets aside the pot and puts the kettle on to boil. He reaches into the pouch on his belt and plucks out a little handful of dried flowers. Despite the hearth, he can’t stop shivering. Finally, he undoes his belt and his own tunic and drapes them over the unbroken chair to dry, stands naked before the fire. 

“I don’t need tea,” Katya mumbles. 

“Not everything’s about you, witch,” Trixie says lightly, which makes her laugh again, albeit briefly, her face buried in the pillows. He divides the flowers between two mugs and pours the water over them, then carries them carefully over to the bed. “We used to drink this after battle,” he says, knee-walking across the furs toward her. “Supposed to help with injuries.”

She raises herself up on one arm and breathes in the steam. “Ironwort,” she says, taking it from him. Trixie nods. “So clever. How annoying.” 

He shrugs, sipping his own mug, though it’s too hot and hasn’t steeped nearly long enough to do any good. “I don’t know if it’ll help with being beaten nearly to death by angry gods, but…” 

“It’s the thought that counts, tricksy one,” she murmurs, pursing her lips to blow on the tea. She looks half-drowned still, the color slowly coming back to her face but her hair matted with sand and braided with seaweed. He puts his mug on the low table beside the bed and starts carefully combing his fingers through it, picking out algae and flecks of coral. She makes a soft sound in the back of her throat, her eyes closing. She sits up a little straighter and tilts her head back. Trixie’s fingers move through her hair, untangling and preening, but his eyes follow the line of her neck, her shoulders, the flush that slowly blooms across her collarbones, visible even in the low candlelight. 

“Is that okay?” he asks her. Her hair falls through his fingers, sleeker and smoother the more he works. She says nothing. “Drink your tea,” he reminds her. Her pale eyes open, find him looking at her. She doesn’t smirk, doesn’t joke, doesn’t do anything but stare straight back at him. “It’ll help,” he says mildly, before she surges forward and opens his mouth with hers. 

Hunger blinds him. He fumbles the cup from her hands and moves it to the floor, taking a splash of scalding tea to the wrist that he barely feels. She wraps herself tightly around him, warm and writhing in his lap. She’s moving against him like he’s already inside her, making soft sounds into his mouth. 

“Please, can I,” he starts to say, and she’s nodding at once, whimpering, but she still seems surprised when he pushes her down flat on her back and slips under the covers to rest between her legs. 

“Oh,” she says, “ _oh,_ ” as he kisses her there, sucks the salt from her skin, as he swallows her like seawater. Men go mad that way, he thinks distantly as she shudders beneath him. She grabs his neck, his ears, holding him tight against her, and he thinks of nothing but her, the ocean of her, how she told him once the ocean was what he belonged to and how he agreed. She cries out, twisting, and he doesn’t stop, rides the wave that she is until she forces him away with a gasp of giddy laughter, curling into herself and trying to catch her breath. 

“Fuck,” she wheezes, grabbing for him and pulling him up into her arms. She can barely kiss him, the way she’s smiling. “Trixie,” she murmurs, holding the name gently in her clasped hands. 

“Do you need a minute?” he asks her. She squeezes him tight, shakes her head. 

“Uh-uh. No way. I want more right this second,” she says, rolling over and practically springing to her knees. “Like, _now_ now.”

“Good.” He looks up at her, smooths a hand up one hip. She cocks her head at him, her smile fading slightly. 

“You’re trembling,” she points out. “Baby, I’m sorry, do _you_ need a minute?”

He shakes his head. She reaches down and covers his hand on her hip with her own, watching him expectantly. “Have me,” he rasps. “Take me. The way you said.”

He watches her realize what he means. Her brows knit together. Something in her eyes goes cloudy. She tucks her hair behind one ear. “I don’t want a fucking consolation prize, Trixie,” she says, her jaw tight. “I don’t want your pity.”

“It’s not. I don’t,” Trixie says quickly. He squeezes her hand tighter, focuses all his nerves into that point. Looming over him, she looks titanic, every bit the demigod she is. “I want to know you.” He doesn’t know how to explain, doesn’t know how to tell her how many times he’s come so close to asking for just this. “I want you to know me like that.” 

Katya drops her head back and sighs. Trixie watches the knot broaden in Katya’s throat, watches his jaw widen, and when he lowers his face back down to stare at him, Trixie can barely move, awe-struck at the look on his face, the sharpness in his eyes. “I’ll degrade you,” he says. “I’ll make you ashamed.” 

Trixie clambers up onto his knees to face him straight on. “You won’t,” he says. He’s wobbly, off-balance, and Katya puts a hand on his hip, stills him, brings him in closer so their bodies are flush. “You can’t, I don’t think,” Trixie says. He sounds breathless, soft like he never is. “Or, no, fine, go ahead. I don’t care.”

Katya circles his arms around Trixie’s waist, buries his face in his neck. There’s nothing new about this, but Trixie feels his eyes tighten, feels the rattle of his heart in his chest. “I’m gonna flay you open,” Katya says in a low rumble. “There’s no stone of you I plan to leave unturned.” He can feel him now, the press of him hot in the hollow of Trixie’s hip. 

“Good,” Trixie says, almost laughing. “I mean, like, that’s insane, but…” Katya’s laughing too, soft and sweet on his shoulder. Outside, the sleet hisses over the trees. He can hear it through the window, the cracks in the door. “But no, no. Do it.” 

“Yeah?” Katya kisses him once before placing both hands on Trixie’s shoulders and spinning him carefully, guiding him down onto his hands and knees. He bites his tongue. It’s too dark for either of them to see how hot and bright he knows he’s flushed. “Before the gods and all?” Katya’s voice is in the small of his back, on the move, drifting down along his spine. Trixie’s fingers and toes curl, twitch in the blankets. “What’ll They think of you?” he asks, and then Trixie feels the heat of his tongue and stifles a sound behind clenched teeth. He smothers his face against the bed. 

“Don’t care.” His voice cracks like it hasn’t since he was a boy. Katya doesn’t laugh at him. He maps him with his hands, his mouth. “What will you think of me?” Trixie whispers. Katya groans, and Trixie arches, pounding his fist against the furs. “That’s - _that!_ \- that’s all I’m worried about.” 

Katya pulls back. Trixie follows him with his hips before he can stop himself. “I think the fucking world of you,” Katya says hoarsely, draping himself over Trixie’s back. “I want you so badly. And it’s not a trick. And it’s not because you’ve bested me somehow. You’ve never even come close.” Trixie snorts out a laugh, even as he feels Katya slicking him with oil, even though nothing’s ever been less funny than this moment. “I just like you,” Katya whispers. “I won’t degrade you, honey, I promise. I’ll honor you. I mean to honor you.” 

“You do,” Trixie says, squeezing his eyes shut against reflexive tears. Katya makes a soft sound, holds him close, pushes in slowly. There’s tension, pressure, a moment of it, but his body knows what to do, knows how to let him in, how to open. He gives way. He _gives_. That he could be so permeable, that he could make such space, is a shock, a wonder. He swallows a cry. Gratitude wells up like the tide, full of living things. Katya reaches forward and grabs his fist, squeezes it in his hand. Trixie gives, his hand falling open in his. 

He knows about metamorphosis, transformation, enchantment. He knows his body is mutable. He always thought of it as something that might happen to him, not something he’d choose. Katya’s breath comes in short, hard puffs on the back of his neck. “Come on,” Trixie chokes out. “For me.” 

“Uh-huh,” Katya says. “For you, yeah.” He reaches around and gets a grip on him. “For you,” he says, and wrecks him like a ship.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ohhhhh boyyyyy. i'd really love to hear your thoughts, as always. thank you so so much for reading and commenting - it keeps me going in a way i will never be able to fully explain.


	6. goddess of doorways

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Hey,” Katya says suddenly. He looks almost surprised at himself. Trixie raises an eyebrow at him. 
> 
> “Hey,” he says slowly, but Katya’s shaking his head. 
> 
> “Hey, like…” He reaches up and strokes his thumb down the line of Trixie’s nose. Trixie pulls back, laughing, until Katya says, “Maybe you can stop. You know? Maybe you don’t really have to go.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you thank you to [beanie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/beanierose/pseuds/beanierose) for the beta work. and thank you thank you to you for reading! if you're celebrating holidays, i hope they're cozy and warm. if you're not, i hope you're cozy and warm anyway!
> 
> playlist remains [here](https://www.tinyurl.com/stuttersail). i love hearing what you think of this story, and the music is a huge part of that for me. ok. let's get into it, shall we?

The days are short, but Trixie finds he doesn’t mind it. Katya finishes making his new cloak, and it keeps him high-summer warm as they hunt together in the forest, foraging for pine nuts and berries and the occasional bird that Katya promises isn’t a former sailor or adventurer. “Just a regular bird,” Katya says once, watching Trixie roast it over the fire. “Kind of an asshole, actually. He had two or three little feathered girlfriends at a time. Mothers, too, all of them wondering when he’d settle down and watch the nest with them.”

“I mean, I never knew my father, either, and I turned out fine,” Trixie says with a shrug. Katya doubles over with laughter.

The days are short, but they make the most of them. Katya leads him through new falls of quick-melting snow to the hot pool she’d told him about, where they strip off as fast as they can in the freezing air and then soak for as long as they can take it, until they’re flushed and sluggish with heat. Some days the only thing that gets him out once they’re in is the weight of her pressed against him, how she’ll swim slowly toward him and shove him back into the rocks, churning the water around them with the movement of her hips. Usually that’s all it takes to have him scrambling up on dry land, racing her back to the house. Sometimes they don’t make it, sprawling out instead by the pool on Trixie’s beautiful cloak, steam rising from their skin and their breath clouding in the air around them.

The days are short, but he likes the nights better, anyway. He plays his lyre for hours while Katya weaves, makes up stupid little songs to make her laugh. The house is warm now thanks to a new enchantment Katya unspooled all around the walls like so much yarn. She opened up a new room for him, too, after he went down to the ship and retrieved some of his cold-weather supplies, boots and warmer tunics and a few extra blankets and dried fruit that would’ve rotted onboard after all this time, anyway. Visiting the ship was a minor haunting, and he came back quiet and ghost-trailed, but Katya didn’t press him on it, just made space on the shelves for dried fruit and spread the blankets on the bed like a good host.

The days are short. They spend long evenings on the couch, cracking each other up, telling stories until their voices are hoarse. The bees gave plenty of honey before going to sleep for the season, more than enough to get them through the cold months. Trixie sneaks it with a spoon when he thinks Katya’s not looking, even though she sees everything. “You’re the hungriest man I’ve ever met in my life,” she laughs, and he sucks his teeth but he agrees, privately, turning away from the kitchen, crawling toward her across the bed and ducking his head under the covers for a taste of her. He’s keeping a secret inventory of every sound Katya makes, how to earn them in whatever form he finds her. He loses hours that way, learning her, unraveling himself for him like a scroll.

He keeps waiting to get sick of Katya, waiting for the resentment and the rage to creep back in, for his impatience to get louder than his heartbeat in his ears when he wakes up to Katya’s nest of tangled hair and his pale sleepy eyes and his early-morning rasp of _Hey, sailor._ There are even some days they barely speak, some days they hardly touch, but Katya’s there, always, a gold shadow in the corner of his vision, stretching his body or doing spellwork or talking to the animals or mending some tool or garment. Nudging him with his elbow: “Hey, Trixie, what do your people call that bright star?” or “Honey, what’s missing from this soup?” or “Baby, we did a lot today. Why don’t we call it a night?”

The days they barely leave the bed at all are his favorites. Lazy, Katya calls him, but he’s wrong - Trixie earns his rest, tires Katya out, no small feat considering that he’s made of energy, that actual sunlight flows in his veins. Katya’s ruthless when he wants to be, exhaustive in his passion, and this evening Trixie lies, barely verbal, across Katya’s chest, feeling soft and sore and clingy with pleasure.

“This one,” Trixie murmurs, thumbing the eyeball on Katya’s wrist. Katya lies with his eyes closed, mouth twitching up in amusement as Trixie prods at him.

“To turn invisible,” he says. He blinks out of existence, demonstrating, a phantom mouth closing on Trixie’s ear, and then reappears again. Trixie barely registers this as strange. His measuring stick for marvels and wonders is thrown all the way off after so many months with the witch.

“Didn’t hurt?” Trixie asks. Katya opens his eyes and raises a brow at Trixie.

“Are you nuts? Of course it did,” he laughs. He takes his wrist in his opposite hand like it’s still alive with pain. “And it was fucking tricky. Like, a slip-up wouldn’a killed me like it would have you, but I was blitzed on raw magic all the time back then.” He bugs his eyes out, grinds his jaw. “Losing days while I waited for my veins to stitch back together would’ve made me insane. I mean, more insane.”

Trixie sits up. “Hang on,” he says. “You did them all yourself?”

Katya’s still tracing over the lines on his wrist. “Honey, who do you think would’ve done them for me?” he asks with a quiet laugh. 

Trixie’s seen men tattooed, traitors and mutineers and criminals, writhing in pain and trying not to cry out. He pictures Katya alone here on his island, slicing into himself again and again, rubbing ash into the cuts so the scars will never fade. His hands jolt towards Katya’s briefly, but he drops them. It doesn’t help either of them to nurse a closed wound. Instead, he nods toward the shape on Katya’s other wrist, a fox or bear or cat. Katya follows his gaze. “Sleight of hand,” he says, holding it up before Trixie’s eyes. “Illusion.” 

“Like when you stole my lyre,” Trixie says. Katya snorts.

“No, baby, you forgot about your lyre, so I put it away,” he says. Trixie rolls his eyes. Katya laughs his snake laugh. “No magic required.”

“Why do you only have them…” Trixie trails off, waving his hands inanely over Katya’s body, “like this?”

Katya frowns. “Like - oh! You mean in this form?” Trixie nods. Katya pillows his hands behind his head, staring up at the ceiling. A draft blows harmlessly against the door, but Trixie still cuddles in close to him, even though he grunts in feigned annoyance. “So some of what I do is, like, inherent, right?” Katya’s voice is so low, so steady, calm like it never is. Trixie nods against his chest, feeling himself starting to doze. “The right parents. If you don’t got aptitude you can’t learn nothin’. But learning more, getting good at it, that requires sacrifice.” Trixie cracks his eyes open but doesn’t look up. Katya’s voice is level, still, quietly amused. “And this body _hates_ pain. That one - I mean, doesn’t _love_ it, but that skin is so much stronger.”

If Trixie’s very still he can hear the little drum of Katya’s heart. His own pulse beats in time in the hollow of his neck, in the softest parts of him. “This skin’s pretty strong, Katya, I don’t know,” Trixie murmurs.

“I’ve had a lot of time to heal,” Katya mutters, waving the moment away like it’s nothing more than smoke. Trixie snorts. 

“Did I say strong?” he says dryly. “I meant, like, tough, leathery…” 

Katya screams in delight. “I hate you, you cunt,” he crows, shoving Trixie away so he rolls across the bed. He’s back on him in a second, pinning him down, and Katya lets him, writhes happily beneath him, his grin morning-bright. Trixie’s throat catches. There’s firelight in Katya’s long hair, moon all over his face. That he’s beautiful is so obvious as to be kind of embarrassing to say aloud, and Trixie’s ears can’t take any more shrieking. So he says nothing, just looks at him, lets Katya feel the whole weight of his body and his attention. 

“Hey,” Katya says suddenly. He looks almost surprised at himself. Trixie raises an eyebrow at him. 

“Hey,” he says slowly, but Katya’s shaking his head. 

“Hey, like…” He reaches up and strokes his thumb down the line of Trixie’s nose. Trixie pulls back, laughing, until Katya says, “Maybe you can stop. You know? Maybe you don’t really have to go.” 

The laugh fades from his mouth. “Katya,” he says. They don’t talk about this. Trixie’s ship floats, untouched, on the southern shore. There’s no sailing in the winter, no crew to sail. Not since their fight months ago have either of them brought up Trixie’s life, everything before this and everything he’s destined for, the shadow of it looming angular on the sand.

“I know, I know,” Katya says, rolling his eyes. “Your kingdom. Your duty. But can I just say something, Trix?” His hands find Trixie’s, squeeze his knuckles against his own. “The world is full of kings. The world is not full of this.”

Trixie’s ribs get tight. “What’s _this,_ exactly?” he asks. “Other than your incredibly clammy hand.”

“Okay -” Katya sits up abruptly. Trixie scrambles off him. “This is it with you, huh?” Katya says lightly, scooting toward the end of the bed. He turns his back to him, twisting his hair sharply up into a knot. “Always trying to play games, always trying to be the clever one.”

“Oh, Katya, come on,” Trixie says. He burrows under the covers, hunting the warmth Katya’s body left behind. The muscles of Katya’s back flex and ripple as he leans down for his robe crumpled on the floor and shrugs into it. Trixie notes the space between his shoulder blades that’s free of tattoos, the space he couldn’t reach. A chill goes through him. “I’m just saying,” he protests. Katya’s hair tumbles free of its knot and he whips it up again like it’s insulted him. 

“‘What’s _this,’”_ Katya says, making his voice deep and stupid to imitate Trixie’s. “You know what _this_ is.”

“Let’s not do this.” Trixie stretches his leg out and pokes Katya’s hip with his toes through the blankets, but he only gets to his feet and crosses to the kitchen. “Look, you’re talking like I have any choice in the matter. Which I don’t, something a certain sea hag I could name made sure of several months back.” 

“It’s not like it matters,” Katya says. Trixie sees from the set of her shoulders that she’s shifted, all her tattoos hidden away. “It’s not your fault, honey, it’s on me. I just have to resign myself to losing.” 

Trixie spots his tunic where he’d discarded it on the nearby lounge and leans as far out of the bed toward it as he can. His fingers graze it but don’t quite connect. He whines like an ailing dog. Katya glances at him with her lips pursed against a smile, her nose wrinkling. “Losing what? _To_ what?” he asks. She shakes her head, going back to filling her arms with ingredients from her shelves of herbs and dried things. Always something to do.

“Your _quest,_ ” she says finally, shrugging. “Your little _voyage_. That’s the thing, Trixie. You see how there’s no way out for me? You go, and that’s it, that’s the story. You’ve bested me. You’ve tamed me.”

Trixie snorts, but the intended effect is lost as he reaches for his tunic once again and instead tumbles naked from the bed, legs tangled in the blankets. Katya’s crumbling herbs in her fingers with her back turned, so doesn’t see it happen. Small victories. “Who would ever believe you could be tamed?” he scoffs as he dresses. “You’re feral. You foam at the mouth. Your hair is full of fleas.” 

She likes that one, cutting him a sneaky grin almost despite herself. “Bitch,” she says, in a low, fond voice.

“And anyway, why would I _want_ to tame you?” he asks. He goes to her, presses his body against hers, belts his arms around her hips and rests his chin on her shoulder. “You’d make a horrible pet. You’re barely house-trained.”

“Because you’re a hero,” she says softly. She spins so he’s holding her properly, starts tracing his face again like she’s trying to memorize it to sculpt later. “Do you get that? Whatever you do, you win.”

“You told me that what men say doesn’t matter,” he says. “Why should you care what stories get told about you? Like, who’s to say anybody will tell stories with me in them at all?” 

“They will,” she says immediately. “They already do, don’t they? How do you think I found out about you in the first place, sailor?” She kisses him once, then peels herself out of his arms and goes back to her herbs. “And you’re right. I shouldn’t care. It’s stupid. But I have a soft spot for stupid things. And you know what gets really old? Being a villain. Being defeatable. Being a box to check on every aspiring hero’s quest. Where do you think all those animals came from?” She sweeps her hand out toward the forest, where the hills and caves breathe with gentle, thinking beasts, curled up and sleeping in huddles for the winter. Trixie can’t keep the surprise off his face. She passes a hand over her own, transfigures it into his, his mouth hanging open and his eyes stunned blank. “Uh-huh. You’re not the first traveler with a chip on his shoulder banging down my door,” his face says, then pauses. “You might be the first to actually, you know, _break it down,_ but…” 

He flaps his hands at her. “Cut that out. I hate that.” His face twists with laughter, and then she’s herself again. “But you didn’t change me, though,” he says. “Even though I haven’t - even though you could.” 

She shakes her head. His mouth goes dry. He swallows, swallows again. “So what’s _this,_ ” she says flatly. “I mean, do you really need me to tell you? Or can I just ask the question that really matters?” 

“Yes,” he says. Her hands move toward his, and he takes them without thinking, lets her squeeze his fingers. 

“Don’t you want to rest?” she whispers. “I mean, honey, when does this stop being some tale about a hero’s journey and start being a love story?”

\---

First, the ice melts off the deep green pond, though it’s still too cold for swimming. Then, shoots suddenly appear in the dark earth around the house, stretching their little fingers weakly toward the sky. At dawn, they start waking to birdsong, louder than it’s been in ages. Trixie is just getting used to the sun on his bare arms again on the day that Katya screams for him from down in the pen, a high, urgent sound that cuts through the air and has him sprinting down the path with his feet bare, heart thudding under his chin.

“Zeus’ fucking taint!” Trixie yells as he skids to a halt. Katya laughs, even surrounded as she is by a blood-soaked litter of piglets. “What’s happening?”

“This is not the energy I need from you at the moment, Trix,” she says. She’s got one of the squirming creatures clutched close to her chest, two of her fingers stuck in its tiny, shrieking mouth. “Go back up to the house and get - an old cloak, a blanket, anything. Now!”

“But -” Trixie stares, his mind warping around the sight before him. 

“Like, _now,_ ” Katya says firmly. The sow lying at her feet squeals in agreement, and Trixie, thoroughly spooked, darts back up the way he came, slipping on fresh mud and raw new grass with every footfall. 

When he returns, panting, holding the cloak out toward her, she deposits the piglet into it and shoves it back toward Trixie’s chest. “Hold it,” she says. “Tight like that.”

“What do I do?” Trixie squawks. The piglet wriggles in his arms, and he rolls one shoulder forward to secure the blanket more tightly across its back. “What am I doing?” Katya’s kneeling by the sow with her back to him, head bowed in concentration.

“Like, making sure it doesn’t die?” she says without looking at him. “Keep it breathing. I’m trying to get its brothers and sisters latching, but that one’s not gonna make it without a little help.”

The pig digs its snout into his neck, making quiet, helpless noises. His throat gets tight and he squeezes it in its blanket, letting it burrow against him. “All right, okay,” he babbles at it. “Hi, it’s okay. I know.”

After a few minutes, the pen now nearly silent as the other piglets feed, Katya rises and turns to face Trixie. “You’re doing good,” she says. “It looks fine. It likes you, Trix, look.” As if he’s taken his eyes off the little thing this whole time. The piglet is snuffling softly on his shoulder. It’s warm and soft and Trixie’s whole face feels like it’s the wrong size for his skin. He shrugs, hoisting the pig up to get a better grip. 

Katya stands with him there in the doorway of the pen, watching the tiny pink piglets suckling away at what Trixie believes used to be his boatswain. “What did you do?” Trixie hisses in Katya’s ear. She’s got a dreamy look on her face - greenish, but smiling. 

“I don’t know what you mean,” she whispers back. “I facilitated the miracle of life. And, I mean, I also changed them into pigs, but that’s pretty well-established by now, isn’t it?”

“You know that’s not what I’m talking about,” Trixie says. It feels important to keep his voice down, for some reason. “They were all men!” 

Katya scoffs. “As far as they told _you,_ ” she says primly. “And, anyway, who cares? They look happy, don’t they?” 

Trixie looks at the sow sprawled on the floor, her eyes half-closed, her babies quiet and content as they feed. She’s a pig. Her wide mouth curves up into a natural smile. She does look happy. They all do. None of the other grown pigs even seem to notice what’s happening. It’s simple to them, no different from rain or breakfast or birdsong. He nods and swallows hard. “You think this one’s okay?” He points with his chin at the little pig in his arms. She’s still smiling, a bit of a soft laugh at his expense in it. 

“Once they’re warm and clean and breathing, it’s easy,” she says. “It’ll be rolling around with the others in no time. You want me to take a turn with it?” He shakes his head. Her collarbones are still smeared with blood and viscera from holding the pig close before Trixie arrived. There’s a streak of it on her robe, and in her hair where she must have cleared the pig’s throat with her fingers and then brushed a strand from her face. It’s disgusting. He leans in and kisses her, the pig held briefly between their two bodies. When he pulls back, her clear eyes are glittering. She reaches toward him and strokes the creature’s snout. 

“You want piglets of your own some day?” she asks. Trixie scowls at her, but she doesn’t look like she’s joking. He flexes his toes in the cool dirt.

“No,” he tells the animal. “Maybe. I don’t know.”

“I’d carry your baby if you wanted,” she says. She turns from him and goes back to the sow, kneeling by her blissed-out face. “I would. If you really wanted. I think I could do it, you know, I think I could hold one shape for the months when it was growing. I’ve never tried it, but I’d give it a go.”

“Katya.” He follows her, takes a knee by her side. There’s no way to tell from her tone if she’s teasing or serious. Katya lifts the piglet in its blanket out of his arms and cuddles it against her chest. He takes a deep breath so he doesn’t fall right over into the mud.

She’s still looking at the pig, not him, her lips pouting like they do when she’s not thinking about it. “Give me something to remember you by, anyway,” she says. 

He bites hard on his tongue and stifles a wince. “Please,” he says around the pain. “Where exactly am I going?”

“You could’ve wrecked everything if you wanted to, you know.” She leans forward and touches the piglet’s snout against her own nose, imitates its quiet snorts back to it. Trixie stares at her, waiting. “I invited you in,” she says eventually. “I showed you all my things. You could’ve destroyed my spells and my home and made it so miserable to live with you that I would’ve had no choice but to send you on your way.”

“And that would’ve worked?” Trixie says flatly. 

“I don’t know.” She’s still so quiet. One of the suckling piglets nudges one of its siblings and they both tumble helplessly onto their backs. Trixie inches toward them and sets them upright, helps them latch on again, following some quiet pull in his hands that knows what to do. “You could’ve, though,” Katya says.

“But I would never have done that,” Trixie says. “Like, I’m not a monster either, you know?” 

“No, you’re not.” She looks up at him now. Her eyes are red. “Not at all.” 

“Katya.”

“I can - fuck, okay,” she says, letting out a long, shaky breath. Trixie is suddenly seasick. “I can enchant your boat,” she says. “So you don’t need a crew. I mean, they’re - they won’t change back, I feel like you can see that now, they’re not going anywhere, but -” 

“Change me instead,” he blurts. 

Katya blinks. The little piglet almost slips from her hands, and she hoists it closer to her, eyes wide. “What?”

He goes to both knees. Mud and blood and whatever else squishes up over his calves. “Go on,” he whispers. “I’m asking you to.”

“No,” she says immediately. Her face goes pale, the color draining from her lips. It all feels so simple now, so easy. He holds back a laugh and scoots closer to her, taking care not to disturb the new family of pigs between them. 

“Come on,” he says. She shakes her head, and he reaches both hands out, touches her face, her dirty hair. “Katya, please. It can be something nice, a dog or a horse or something.” 

She rears back, dodging his hands. The piglet squeals softly, and she readjusts her grip. “Are you crazy?” she hisses. “I’m not changing you. Stop it.”

He shakes his head. “Change me!” he pleads. He can feel his own voice straining, getting thin, as if he’s reaching for a note out of his range. “You can make me something useful, something strong, something that can help you. I’ll love it.” He swipes his wrist over his eyes. He can barely register why. “I’ll be happy,” he whispers. “I’ll be so happy.” 

Katya gets to her feet, struggling without the use of her hands, which still clutch the baby. “I don’t want you like that.” Her voice is too loud. “I want you like this!” 

“Katya, listen,” Trixie says. He stands too, watching the ground for errant piglets. “Change me and then it’s over.” It makes so much sense. His body feels distant, far from his brain, spiralling into the air like one of her flocks of enchanted birds. “Change me, then, then…” He’s surprised to hear his voice catch. He scrubs at his face again. “Then you’ve _won._ ”

“I don’t win if I lose you!” She’s yelling now, the piglet bucking and squealing to get away. She sets it down and it speeds over to its mother, nudging against its siblings. Katya’s eyes are full of fire. “That’s not winning!” 

“Well, I don’t want to win!” Trixie knows how he sounds, can hear how the words come out childlike and stubborn. He takes a deep breath. “I want you to win,” he says, quieter. “You deserve to win.”

“Trixie, that is such horseshit,” Katya spits. Her hands tighten into fists. “You think I care? That doesn’t mean anything to me. It’s not winning if I don’t get you.” The littlest piglet is squealing again, trying and failing to burrow close to the sow. Katya scoops it up again at once, cradles it in her arms. Trixie still feels like crying, but chokes it back. “You’re the prize, you idiot,” Katya whispers. Trixie’s helplessness does what it always does and calcifies into pointless, directionless anger.

“I hate that we’re doing this here,” he snaps. “I hate that I’m up to my ankles in pig shit having this conversation with you. I want to go back inside, I want to get warm, I want to, like - I don’t know, Katya. I want it to stay winter. And I never thought I’d say that. I want it to be too cold and rough to sail.” He shakes his head. She strokes the pig’s little ears, though her eyes don’t leave his face. “I just want to deplete your honey stores, you know? I want to play my lyre while you putter around pretending to be busy. I’ve lost track of how long I’ve been trying to get back on track. I just want to waste time.” She laughs at that, weakly. Trixie’s lips twitch at the sound. “Like, I love you,” he says, throwing his hands up. “You get that, right, witch?” 

“Fuck, Trixie.” She places the piglet down again, rakes her hands down her robes, looks back up at him shifted into his male form. “How averse are you to getting boned down in this pig pen right now?” he asks. “I’m asking for a friend.” 

“You don’t have any friends,” Trixie says, rolling his eyes, and Katya shrieks, and then they’re both laughing, loud enough that the pigs look mildly taken aback. Katya steps carefully over the piglets and stands before Trixie, blinking his light eyes up into his face, and Trixie grabs him and kisses him, pig gore be damned. 

“So what are we gonna do?” Katya asks when they break apart. “You can’t stay here forever, Trixie, I know that. You’ll hate me in a year.” 

“I hate you now, what’s the difference?” Trixie drawls. Katya makes like he’s going to smack him, but doesn’t connect. He never does. “I don’t know. I don’t want to go without you.” Katya gestures with his empty hands, a sign for hopelessness in any language. There was a time Trixie would pray to Athena for guidance when his mind spun and came to no conclusions, but she’s gone as snow. He feels something wet press against his calf and looks down to find the piglet there, rooting at him softly. He picks it up. “My men are gonna be happy here forever,” he says to the top of its fuzzy head. “If I go, if you let me go, I’m going to have to do it alone.”

The truth of it hangs grey and heavy in his chest, and when Katya gently says, “They’re not your men, honey. They’re just pigs,” it starts to rain.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> comments, kudos, bookmarks, feedback, tumblr asks (stutter8), all keep me going. the response to this has been surprising and beautiful, and i'm so excited to hear what you think. <3


	7. goddess of memory

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Are you going to be brave?” he chides lightly. Trixie’s stomach flips at the sound. He really wants nothing more than to drag Katya back to the house, pull him into bed, show him just how brave he can be. Instead, he undoes his pin and lets his tunic fall open to his waist.
> 
> “I don’t know yet.” A nervous laugh erupts out of his mouth. “Probably not.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SURPRISE BONUS CHAPTER! MERRY CHRISTMASTIIIIME HAPPY HOLIDAAAAYS
> 
> this one's short, so it didn't feel right making it a whole weekly update on its own. while it is important, i should also say that there's a big ol' content warning on this one. this chapter contains a fairly brief but graphic description of ancient tattooing, which is to say, scarification. there is a knife, there is cutting, there is blood. if this doesn't sound like something you want to read, you can skip the knife stuff by doing a ctrl+f for "Trixie blinks" once you read the sentence that ends, "...but you can take it."
> 
> take care of yourself above all! huge thanks to [beanie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/beanierose/pseuds/beanierose) for betaing on such short notice, and for always leveling with me. the playlist is [right here](https://www.tinyurl.com/stuttersail).

“I know it looks scary,” Katya says, “but trust me, it’s better this way.” 

Trixie watches her sharpen her blade on the smooth grey stone she pulled from the water earlier in the afternoon. Sitting beside her by the riverbank, he feels like nothing so much as one of her docile animals, a deer or a sheep, waiting patiently to be slaughtered. He snorts. “I know how knives work,” he says. “Sharper is better. I do feel a little bit like I might throw up, though.” 

She glances at him for a second, her eyes amused. “We don’t have to do this, tricksy one.” 

“No, I want to.” He nods, nods again when she looks unconvinced. “I actually do,” he tells her, and she turns her attention back to the blade, to the steady anguished scrape of it against the rock, even as the sound makes them both shudder. 

Katya’s knife is narrow and sinister, with a black hilt inlaid with red jewels. She told him it was a gift, but didn’t say from whom. Divinity wafts from it, tangible in the hair rising on the back of Trixie’s neck at the sight of it. “Katya,” he says. She looks up again at the sound of his voice, how it comes out thin as winter breath. At once, he changes form, puts down the knife and holds out his arms. Trixie scrabbles across the wet rocks toward him and lets himself be folded in against his chest. 

“I don’t like this,” Katya mumbles against Trixie’s ear. “Feels like I’m torturing you.” 

“I thought you loved that,” Trixie says. Katya’s chest vibrates with laughter. “And anyway, this was your idea. And it’s an idea I’m for, for what it’s worth.” 

Katya huffs. “May I have a kiss?” he asks. Trixie groans in exasperation to make Katya laugh some more, then kisses him with his mouth open.

He could lose himself in this for long minutes, for hours, tangling his hands into Katya’s hair and swallowing every grateful little sound he makes. But he knows it’s time they don’t have. He pulls away, looking back down at the knife lying beside them, pointing in Trixie’s direction. Katya looks at it, too.

“Are you going to be brave?” he chides lightly. Trixie’s stomach flips at the sound. He really wants nothing more than to drag Katya back to the house, pull him into bed, show him just how brave he can be. Instead, he undoes his pin and lets his tunic fall open to his waist.

“I don’t know yet.” A nervous laugh erupts out of his mouth. “Probably not.” 

Katya rinses his hands, the knife. He scoops up clean water from the river and pours it over Trixie’s skin, dries him carefully with the cloth he’s brought. Trixie watches him, how his brows knit together in concentration, how his lips purse. When Katya lifts the knife and presses it to the skin over his heart, Trixie takes in a sharp breath against his will. 

“If you were ever going to kill me,” he says, holding in what feels like a hysterical shriek, “this would be a pretty good time to do it, wouldn’t it?”

“Oh, _yeah,_ Trixie,” Katya agrees. He holds the knife steady. “You walked right into my trap, a year in the making.” His lips curve up. “I can feel your heartbeat all the way to the hilt,” he whispers. “Like I’m holding it in my hand.” 

Trixie tries to calm his pulse like it’s a skittish horse, thinking soothing sounds. “Here we go,” Katya says. “It’s going to hurt, but you can take it.” 

Trixie nods, and Katya begins to slice.

The pain is low, steady, a cold-sharp drag. Trixie’s been hurt in battle before, but that pain is fast and immediate, borne only as long as his feet can’t carry him out of harm’s way. Submitting to this, to stillness in the face of it, requires a kind of patience that he has to draw from some hidden well in his belly, dripping slow as honey through his body. “I can’t believe you did this to yourself,” he hisses. Katya smiles faintly, not looking up from his work. 

“Uh-huh. A lot of times.” He glances up into Trixie’s eyes through a fall of golden hair. “It’s not so awful, right?”

“Just - “ He grits his teeth. His toes curl in the dirt. Katya nods in sympathy. 

“I know,” he soothes, “the holding still. Rotten. I can stop.”

Trixie huffs out a breath, fanning Katya’s hair against his face. “Fuck you,” he grits out. “I’m not telling you to stop.”

“You can fuck me later,” Katya says calmly, undeterred. He makes a few more long, precise cuts.

Trixie groans out another breath. His mind races for something to hold onto, something to take him away from the metal of the blade licking through his flesh.

“Tell me, uh,” he says. 

“Hmm?” Katya’s eyes flash up to his, then back to his work. “What should I tell you?”

“You never told me,” Trixie says, words coming low and in jagged bursts, “why you - why. I mean. I never asked. Why are you - trapped here?” 

Katya bites his mouth shut. The knife slices steadily through Trixie’s skin, up and down, then returns to the first point of contact and starts its journey again, deeper this time. Trixie makes a high noise through his nose before he can stop himself. Katya glances up at his face. “You’re not the only one who’s a pain in the ass,” he says wryly. Trixie manages a tiny nod. “I am…” Katya sighs. “I am hard to control. According to Some, Some who… think I should be controlled.” Trixie feels a soft tickling against his stomach, realizes it’s a trickle of his own blood. He breathes in sharply. “I’m not for everybody,” Katya says. He swipes at Trixie’s skin with the rag, pressing down for a moment, then pulls back. “Okay.” 

Trixie blinks. “You’re done?” he asks. Katya scrunches up his face in an apologetic wince and shakes his head.

“This part’s not great,” he warns.

“Because it’s been a real treat so far!” Trixie tilts his head back and then forward again. Katya brings forth the mortar of ashes he’d prepared earlier that day. Trixie’d watched as he burned his herbs, crushed down the dust until it was smooth and black and fine. “Oh, gods, Katya…” 

“I know, baby,” Katya says, scooping up a handful. “Believe me, I know.” He puts his left hand on Trixie’s shoulder. “We’ll count down, okay? Five, four…” Without warning, he mashes the ash into the new wound with the right, holding Trixie still as he twists, grunting through his teeth. “All right, all right,” Katya murmurs. “Come on, Trix, take a breath, you’re okay.” 

“I _know_ I’m okay.” Trixie hears how his voice sounds, contorted, forced level. Katya keeps his hand pressed over Trixie’s heart, holding him together where he’s sliced him open. The ash sizzles and bites like venom in his blood. “Fuck, can you - can you, like, how long does this part last?”

“The stinging will fade pretty soon,” Katya says. “Just gotta wait for the bleeding to let up a little - no, no, no way, don’t look. Look at me, look at the river, something else.” 

Trixie, panting through his nose like a bull, keeps his eyes fixed on Katya. “Probably a very inappropriate time for me to tell you how sexy you look,” Katya says, and Trixie lets out a shocked bray of laughter. “Seriously, you better tear this ass up later, and that’s not a request. You can just lay there, honey, I’ll take care of everything.” Trixie laughs more, fumbling for Katya’s left hand. Katya gives it to him, gives his fingers a gentle squeeze. He leans in, presses his nose against Trixie’s, snaps his teeth like he might bite. “You _are_ brave,” he says. 

“You don’t need to sound so surprised,” Trixie mutters. He actually does bite, closing his teeth very softly around the tip of Trixie’s nose, then kisses him. He feels a pinch, a rush of cold against his bare skin. Katya pulls back.

“You’re brave,” he says again. “Okay. I mean, it’s still got to do some healing, but that’ll speed the process along.” He takes his hand away, slowly, wipes Trixie’s chest clean of the ash that’s fallen all around the wound. Trixie looks down. 

“Oh - ” The wide, jagged black lines travel from the center of his chest nearly all the way to his left arm, a spread hand’s width. “It’s…” 

“The waves, the sea, uh-huh,” Katya says. She flickers briefly female, then back again. “I mean, like, as best as I could.” 

Trixie nods. Fire climbs up his throat, burns his ears. He wants to touch, but the skin around the tattoo is still numb and cool from the enchantment, and he’s afraid to. “The master I serve, right?” he says, forcing himself to laugh. “No, it looks good, Katya, it does.” 

“Doesn’t have to look good,” he says. “Just has to make you remember.”

Trixie fusses with his pin, turns it over and over again in his hands. “You think I could forget?” he says quietly. Katya lifts one shoulder. 

“When you’re lost,” he says, “I mean, _if_ you’re lost, just. You know.” He twiddles his fingers at Trixie in a half-hearted wave. “Remember this. Okay? Remember me. You’re gonna be fine. You can do it alone.”

In the distance, the ocean rumbles. The tide’s coming in. “I want you to come with me,” Trixie says. “I know I can do it alone. But why do I have to?” 

Katya gets to his feet. Trixie rocks forward onto his hands, pushes himself up slowly, wincing against the way the skin of his chest aches and pulls. Katya doesn’t help, just stands with his hands out in case he needs them. “Ask the gods,” he says, but Trixie knows Their days of answering him are long gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> stay warm, stay cozy. thank you so, so much for reading and engaging. we're getting close to the end now, and i'm very glad you're here.


	8. god of water

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Katya pulls away finally with a sigh. “All right, sailor,” he says. “I - fuck. Okay. _Okay.”_ He takes a step back, shakes his hands out, tilts his head to stare into the crimson sky like he’s trying to stop a nosebleed. “Okay, Trixie. I release you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> we're almost there! oh my god. thank you so, so much for reading. the response to this fic has been so warm and so kind and i really hope y'all like this one. i've been so excited to share it with you. heads up: this chapter contains genre-typical gore and violence. you've been warned!
> 
> without [beanie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/beanierose/pseuds/beanierose) i have no idea if this would've ever come together. certainly without her thoughtful and meticulous beta work it wouldn't be half this good. everyone deserves such a good editor and such a true friend.
> 
> if you're doing the [playlist](http://www.tinyurl.com/stuttersail), "dvergmál" is recommended listening. ok i love you enjoy.

A morning comes when the sun rises red as blood. A bad omen, a cruel day for sailing. Trixie curls himself tighter around Katya and finds her awake, her eyes grey in the dim light. “Just one more minute,” she says, pressing her nose against his. 

“What’s the rush?” he mumbles. “We can take as many minutes as we want.” The sun rises in his ribs, too, hot behind the tattoo she carved into him, mostly healed now but still tender, the memory of her knife in every sudden movement. Katya smiles at him from behind a cloud of hair. 

“You always say that, Trix.” She rolls closer, kicks his legs apart, settles there. “But you know it’s not true. Today’s the day.” 

“No,” Trixie groans. Katya presses her hips down against him. 

“We gotta get up before the sun’s too high,” she murmurs. 

“Witch, it’s barely risen.” He slips a hand down between their bodies. A fine line appears between her eyes. She ebbs against him, and he holds steady for her, just watching, letting her.

“I want your mouth,” she says suddenly. He swallows. 

“Do you want to try phrasing that as a request?” She bucks, and he brings his other hand up to the small of her back, steadying her. She grins at him with her big eyes lidded, shakes her head. He snorts. “Like I’m surprised. Here -” He starts to gently roll her onto her back, but she pins him down with both hands, shakes her head again. 

“No, no, you stay there,” she says, surging up onto her knees in one liquid motion. “I want it like this.” His mouth drops open as he stares up at her, and her smile gets wide and wicked. “I’ll take care of you after, honey, don’t worry,” she coos. As if he needs convincing.

“Just, like, watch your hands, I’m still,” he warns, waving weakly toward his chest, but then she settles herself over him and everything else dissolves. She doesn’t need the reminder. She does always take care, in her way. 

It’s over too fast. Katya moves like she’s racing the sun, crushing him into the pillow, then immediately shifts and pushes Trixie over onto his hands and knees before he’s even caught his breath. “Katya!” he gasps out, throwing an arm back to get a grip on his hip. “Fuck, we’ve got _time.”_

“I need you _now,_ though,” he says, and Trixie can hear how his voice strains. 

“I’m not going anywhere,” Trixie murmurs. The witch makes a low sound through his teeth. Trixie breathes out, makes space, gives. “Well, I’m here now, anyway,” he amends quietly. 

Katya can’t stay still after. He’s out of bed and dressed while Trixie’s still facedown in the blankets, splayed out like a sea star in low tide. Every time Trixie manages to look up he’s shifted again: woman, man, somehow both, somehow neither. “Listen,” Trixie calls out, hoarse and wavering, “we don’t have to -” 

“Get up, sailor,” Katya interrupts. “Come on. Let’s go to the beach, okay?”

“Katya.” He rolls out of bed, crosses to her undressed, watches as she flutters between states. He piles his hair up into a knot on top of his head, has shifted again by the time it’s tumbled down her shoulders. “Katya, you gotta calm down.” 

She shoves his tunic into his hands, his gold pin. “Don’t you tell me what I gotta do,” she says lightly. “You’ve got no idea what I’ve gotta do.” 

Trixie starts to dress, busying himself with the creases in his tunic and fastening the pin. Katya’s still whirling around the room, appearing and disappearing cabinets and shelves. “Here,” she says, handing him his belt, the pockets and pouches all neatly packed up. “All your little things.” 

He takes it from her, bewildered. Knife, herbs, wineskin. By the time he’s strapped it on she’s produced his lyre from somewhere, holds it out for him to take. His mouth fills with words. He lets them all out on an exhale instead at the look on her face, how her eyes are iron, even through the tears.

“You’re so beautiful,” he says finally. “I’m going to love you forever.”

“Disgusting,” she sniffles, scrubbing at her face. Trixie laughs and takes the lyre from her, slings it over his shoulders. “Don’t start groveling now, not when you’ve been such a prick this whole time.” 

“Might I suggest adding a real dog of a cry-face to your repertoire, then?” Trixie says lightly. “Can you stop looking so fucking dewy and tragic?” Katya shrieks and then doubles over, coughing. Trixie holds his hand out for her. She takes it, squeezes. Trixie sighs. “All right,” he says, scrubbing a hand over the crown of his head. His hair’s starting to grow in again, mossy black fuzz that seems longer and more unruly every time he touches. Not like there’s time to do anything about it. Not like it matters. He squeezes his eyes shut against the memory of the last time, how Katya took care of the back for him, running her long fingers over the nape of his neck and the base of his skull. Now, Katya goes to the door and pushes it open, gestures for him to go first. 

He takes one last look at the room, committing it to memory, and goes through. 

She turns toward the back of the house, weaving through the garden toward the north shore. “But…” Trixie motions toward the south, where his ship waits, beached and stoic, on the cold sand. “Sorry, I thought…” 

Katya turns back to face him. Her left cheek glows faintly pink with the rising sun. Her right side is all dark red, all shadow. Cruel, cruel weather. “This way, honey,” she says, her voice stone. 

The tide is coming in in long, bitter scoffs, throwing tantrum after little tantrum on the sand. Katya’s father in his chariot has barely appeared, still far off on the horizon, and the air is cold. Trixie wishes he’d brought his cloak. He reaches out for Katya’s hand, but she’s walking ahead of him now, the bottom of her robe going blood-black as it trails through the water. “Hey.” Trixie clenches his jaw as he jogs toward her into the sea, every footfall and tiny splash of it up his legs a new shock. He comes to stand beside her. She stares out at the dark water, but she doesn’t flinch away when he takes her hand. “We don’t have to do this today. We don’t.” 

“You really think you’re gonna love me forever?” she says abruptly to the wind. Trixie nods. 

“I know I am,” he tells her. Katya turns to face him. She’s been crying a little all morning, but now her eyes are dry. 

“Just not enough to stay,” she says. Trixie bites his tongue. He squeezes her fingers again instead of telling her lies. Katya sighs, then leans in and kisses him softly on the mouth. 

Trixie’s eyes slip shut. He can feel Katya shifting against his lips, and brings his hands up to rake them through his hair. The cold water around his feet fades into the back of his mind. Katya twines his arms around Trixie’s waist, holds him tight. His heart beats hard, throws itself forward, like it means to break free and slip into Katya’s chest, go to sleep there beside his like a loyal cat.

Katya pulls away finally with a sigh. “All right, sailor,” he says. “I - fuck. Okay. _Okay.”_ He takes a step back, shakes his hands out, tilts his head to stare into the crimson sky like he’s trying to stop a nosebleed. “Okay, Trixie. I release you.” 

Trixie looks at Katya, at his clear pale eyes and the set of his lips. “Thank you,” he says. Katya says nothing. Something in the machinery of Trixie’s body jolts. His blood hits a wrong note. His tattoo throbs with sudden pain. He brings a hand up to clutch at it and then realizes he can’t get a grip. 

“Katya,” he says. Katya flashes female again, folds an arm protectively across her body, then drops it. Trixie watches it happen. The air around Katya shimmers, all rainbow and silver. His vision is tunneling, growing narrower and wider as he stares. The sky slithers all around him. “Katya?”

“You’re free, Trixie,” she says. “You’re free to be with the one you truly love.”

“What did you…” Trixie raises his hands before his eyes. “Katya, what did you…” 

“You love the sea so much,” Katya says. “You love it so much, why don’t you go and be with it instead of me? See if it can do for you what I did. I’d love to see it try to turn you out like that.”

“Wait,” Trixie says. His fingers are shaking, wriggling. “Wait, stop. What are you doing?” He can’t close his hands, can’t make them fists. “Katya, what did you _do?_ ” His fingers shine in the light. They’re anchovies. They jump off his hands and splash down into the sea, swim in circles around his feet. “ _No!_ ” 

“I guess you did say you wouldn’t be brave,” Katya says quietly. “Fuck’s sake, Trixie, can’t you even try?” 

“No. No!” Trixie gasps. His head swims - he’s sinking inch by inch into the sea now, losing height as his toes change, his feet, his ankles. The swarm of him shimmers around his body, now to his wrists, now to his knees. “I don’t want this, I don’t _want_ -” His tongue, silver-scaled and finned, leaps from his mouth, sails down to join the other little fish spiraling around his body. 

“This is what I was born to do,” Katya says. She gets to her knees in the ocean, the waves lapping at her waist. Trixie stares at her helplessly. Every second more of him slips away. Around the many shining pieces of him, he can feel the ocean, cool and gentle and welcoming, the softest embrace he’s ever known beside hers. “I was born to ruin your plans, to betray you. I mean, come on, Trixie, don’t you _read?_ ” Katya laughs, loud and long and shrill. She is beautiful, she is made of fire. “Don’t you know what they say about scorned women?” 

He cries out, and she wails back at him, mocking the sound. She pushes her robe off her shoulders and shifts, exposing all his tattoos. He scoops up seawater, pours it over his head, splashes it over his body like it’s holy oil. 

“Posiedon!” Katya yells. The fish swim in circles around what’s left of himself, around Katya. The old body is trembling with terror, but joy filters through his gills, makes him swim fast and listen well. Katya’s voice vibrates through the water, fills all of him up, nourishes his many parts. “Poseidon, hear me. This is a plea I never thought I’d have to make, but I come to You now in Your house, low and humble before You.” He digs his hands into the mud, bows his head so his hair sinks bright and weightless toward the ocean floor, seagrass grown backward. Trixie flows between his spread fingers, weaves over his wrists like soft fabric, wild with delight. He could make many homes in this hair, safe and happy. “I never asked You for anything, and I’m never gonna again. But please. I’m begging You. I did what none of You could, what none would dare. I’ve taken Athena’s slave, the trickster who dared insult You, and bent him to my will.” 

The last of the shoal’s old, cumbersome body, with its joyless hunger for the air and ugly, smooth skin, dissolves. It is truly free. It swims all around Katya, lets his voice carry it, twirling in ecstasy. 

“I unmanned him, made him my servant, and now I’ve destroyed him. Brought him low. For You, Poseidon. A tribute to Your might, Your unknowable power, Your depths.” Katya pounds his fist into the sea, and the shoal dances out of his way, delighted. “Please. _Please._ Release me from my prison so I can finish the job. Let me kill him. In Your name, in Your house, in Your honor.” The shoal spirals north, racing toward the deeper, darker water, safe in its many hundreds of bodies, a powerful and changing shape. Katya’s voice rises. “There isn’t much time, Poseidon, he’ll get away. Please, break my curse. Let me kill him for You, and You’ll never hear from me again, I swear, I’ll crawl off somewhere dark and spend the rest of my miserable days in praise of Your glory, Your generosity.” The voice is growing distant. The shoal moves like light through the water, dazzling in its multitude, one great fin, one wide and vigilant eye.

Joy! Freedom! The feast of the water, how every sip and pull holds life, nourishment, all the shoal needs to breathe and swim and dance. The shoal flies ahead, a shriek of movement, on and on, away from the shore, the voice, the warmth of the pointless sun in the ugly world above. It is lost in the sea, but it can never be lost, because it is one, many, it is both a colony, many homes, and a single being, and the sea is its home, where it lives. It swims and swims, its many hundred little mouths and eyes and fins flitting this way and that, feeling the depth of the water, the silence of it, the heavy embrace of the deep all around it, holding it tight. 

A shadow, then. It is felt in pieces, cold and dark in the way that means danger, and then everywhere, all around. Flee! Scatter! And yet, from within the shoal, some miniscule dissent: let it come let it come. Some tiny part, some single scale, that wants to be prey, that means to be taken. The shadow looms, widens, sucks in dark all around. The shoal knows! danger! A great fish! The shoal scatters and coalesces, dissolves and oozes back together, makes its escape into the depths. Still, the soft voice: Let it come let it come!

The shoal flees, twists, makes shapes. It is not as big as the great fish, but it’s fast, and it has joy, the thrill of moving quicker than sight through the water, of changing form. The great fish follows close behind, deeper and deeper. There are other creatures, other fish, all with empty mirror eyes, darting away from the chase, gogogo! The voice inside, stronger now: Let it come. Come on! 

The shoal splits, fractures, breaking. Some lunges away, yet some back, twisting, wrong, toward the great fish. In the mouth of the great fish is death, is the end of joy. All the shoal knows is shape, diving, fleeing danger and eating with many mouths. And yet - another thought, louder, a thought that means nothing in the sea, a made-up thought. The shoal feels it, a refrain that lives in the fins, in its mouths and eyes: I remember.

Despite itself, against its quick and clever reflex, the shoal hovers, trembling, builds a shape, one mind now, all instinct. A long shape, complex, tall and wide and graceful. The shape has a name: _Lyre._ I remember. The shoal shifts again, builds a cruel, sharp shape: _Knife._ I remember! The shoal erupts outward, bursts into leaves and roots, a holy shape: _Herbs._ I remember! I remember! Katya, I remember! Love pours through it, stronger than the joy of the water, brighter than the fear of the great fish. Katya, I remember! The shoal barrels toward her. It makes a wineskin of itself, at last, and pours down her throat, letting itself be swallowed, consumed. She pulls the shoal of him inside of her, holds him there.

Inside the great fish there is darkness and there is the shoal. There is water, some, and air, some. Inside the great fish is a tiny world, and it is where he lives. The shoal can make shapes, some, but it cannot move. The shoal remembers the knife, from some other world. It knows a shape, a sacred shape, carved in hot blood and ash, in the ocean of the old body. There is so little room, so little light. _I remember, Katya._ The great fish opens her terrible mouth and brings in more water, more air, swims straight and slow. In the calm, the dark, the shoal forms the sacred shape: _wave. I remember: I will love you forever._

The shoal changes now, grows tight, grows small, grows weak, and Trixie comes to, gasping for air, sobbing in relief, clutching the tattoo on his chest, which throbs with magic, the magic she put there to save him. He presses his hands to the wall of her belly, the chamber she’s made inside herself for him. “You did it,” he tells her, his voice hitching. “You escaped. You’re so incredible. You had to kill me to do it, sure, but not bad, witch, not bad at all.”

Inside the fish it’s black, close, wet. Trixie’s up almost to his waist in freezing water. His legs are trying to remember how to hold him up; he leans hard against her wall for support. The movement of her is familiar, at least. If he closes his eyes, he can imagine he’s down in the hull of his own ship during a powerful storm. When he was a boy, he was seasick all the time, but now nothing turns his stomach. Hopefully nothing turns hers, either, he thinks, then laughs to himself at the insanity, the absurdity of all this. He stumbles as she tilts gently upward, his arms flailing out for something to grab onto, but she is all slick and dark and he falls to his knees, rolls through the water and sloshes clumsily against her back wall. 

A little more cold water floods in, but lots more air, too. A glint of light from her enormous mouth, a flash of sky, and then she dives again and he plunges into black. There’s no way out of her. Her throat is too narrow for him to climb up. She’s built for holding fish and little bits of plant matter, not men. She’s swallowed as much air as she can, and Trixie takes short, shallow breaths, tries not to waste it. He gets shakily to his feet again, his tunic weighing him down, trying to tug him under. His belt drags down as if it’s full of stones. 

“I don’t know how you do this,” he whispers to her. “How do you change the way you do without losing your mind? Ten seconds as a school of fish and I’m like, ‘Trixie who?’” He feels in his pouches. It’s all there, everything, even the lyre still slung over his back. He shifts it to the front and plays a few notes. It sounds awful, tuneless and sour from the water, but he plucks away regardless, trying to coach his frozen fingers into the familiar chords of a song they both like. He’d play it for Katya in the evenings as they sat by the hearth, wrapped around each other to fight off the oncoming chill. It’s a pastoral tune, a gentle shepherd’s song, but he used to make up bawdy new verses full of vulgar puns, singing whatever he could to shock laughter out of the witch. 

She dives suddenly, throwing him forward. He hits the water face-first with a shriek, rolls spluttering to his feet. “Okay, okay,” he coughs, scrambling up and pushing the lyre back over his shoulder. “No music, I got it! You’re seriously no fun, witch.” 

She surges on and on. Now and again, she glides up to the surface to deliver him more air. He can feel how carefully she swims, how she pushes through the sea in the straightest line she can, trying not to rattle him too much. Still, in the dark, the quiet, with the cold of the water around his legs, his heart works hard in his chest, panic poised to overtake him at any moment. He counts his herbs in the watertight bag, runs his thumb over the hilt of his knife, traces the shape of his golden pin. He loves it for what it is, now, a treasured remnant of his past. His days of faith are far behind him. In a world so dense with wonder, what’s the point of prayer?

He doesn’t sleep but he drifts, slipping against her and trying not to go under for too long. He’s slick with her, his fingers and toes shriveled and aching with cold and salt. He tries to relax each muscle, keep his teeth from chattering, but every brief and blinding burst of the sun feels like the last he’ll ever see. She rocks him softly, and his eyes slip open and closed with no distinction. They feel like a dead fish’s in the dark, flat and wide and sightless, reflecting nothing.

It goes on for hours or days. Trixie passes the time by talking. He’s pretty sure Katya can’t hear him, but he talks to her anyway. He tells her about the Cyclops he fought, about the war, about the giant wooden horse they’d used to sneak inside the city and finally end the fucking thing. His idea. He always liked a design challenge. “Hey, Katya,” he whispers, keeping his voice low to use as little air as possible, “Didn’t you ask me about the sirens? I never told you about that time.” The fish changes directions very slightly, and Trixie drifts, bracing himself against her body. “They have these incredible voices - well, you know, don’t you? Anyway, the crew all plugged up their ears with wax, but I was like, no, I want to hear them. I want to hear everything.” 

The fish dips and then seems to glide up, blowing out air and sucking more in for herself. In a moment she’ll crest again, open her mouth to refill his supply. She’s doing the work for both of them, and Trixie’s chest is tight, knowing how he has to repay her. He swallows. “The sirens, right. Right. So my crew ties me to the mast and they start rowing. And, like, from their perspective, we’re rowing past this island full of these hideous monsters, molting slimy wings and giant claws like daggers and twisted ancient faces - I guess I have a type, huh, witch?” Trixie decides that fish must not be capable of laughter, that’s all. “But Katya, what I heard, what I saw.” He closes his eyes against the indifferent darkness. “It was so beautiful. I would’ve killed any of my crew to jump overboard and swim to them. The things they promised. I never told anyone this. They told me - they sang - “ The words catch. Dangerous to feel so much, with so little air. He breathes in and out, light, slow. “What they sang, basically, was, if I’d go to their island, I’d… I’d be _seen_ there. Understood. Free. I wouldn’t feel so, so weird, so alone.” 

The couple of tears that slip out of his eyes are hot on his frozen face, a second of relief. “Anyway!” he says, shuddering out a laugh. “The rope burn, you wouldn’t believe it, the way I tried to get loose. Not cute. They saved my life, my crew, keeping me tied to that mast. Of course none of it was real. None of what they sang was true. There’s no place like that. Not my kingdom, not my country, not…” 

The words catch. He grits his teeth against the tears, but it’s no use. He chokes out, “I really thought that before I met you. I really did. Oh, gods, Katya, don’t make me do it, I know I said I would, but I’d rather suffocate in here than - ”

She turns, hard. Trixie is hurled sideways and smashes against the wall of her alongside a spray of dead fish. She lets out a long, low note that nearly breaks all his teeth. Trixie doesn’t speak great fish any more than he speaks pig. But he understands. It’s happening. “Here?” he asks her. 

There’s a rumble under his feet, like a ship that’s hit ground, and then she stops swimming. She sings again. Water sloshes over his belly. He trips forward, falls to his knees, taking in a mouthful of foul saltwater. He stumbles up, gagging. He draws his knife. Katya wails a lilting, mournful note.

“You’re not kidding,” he says, forcing himself to laugh. “You really can’t sing. Okay, fuck. We really have to do this, huh?” As if she can answer. As if he doesn’t know. “You’re not like me. You’re always so brave,” he tells her, and he stabs her in the side.

At first, it seems like she doesn’t even feel it, not the way he does, all the way up both arms and straight to his heart. But as he saws away, carefully at first but quickly growing sloppy, exhausted, her great mouth lolls open and she groans. Light floods in, red and orange. Is it dawn again? Dusk? “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Trixie chants, hacking artlessly at the muscular cage of her. She is endless. He cuts again and again, until he’s standing not in water but blood.

His muscles shriek. His veins run poison through his limbs. Every second he pauses, rotates pain out of his shoulder, is another glut of her blood lost, a second they both lose. There is no resting. When he finally breaks through, his fist connecting with cool air on the other side of her, it feels like a dream, like siren song. Reason shoots in through the hole, brings him out of despair and wakes his muscles. “A little more, Katya,” he says, carving. She doesn’t respond. “It’s all right.” 

The light through the fish’s mouth grows brighter. The sun is coming up. It’s almost like no time has passed since they left the house for the last time, like he might open his eyes and find himself in the big bed with Katya sleeping beside him. Sometimes, on the rare occasion Trixie woke first, he’d watch Katya shift forms in his sleep, his body talking to some dream he was having. He moved the bed, sometimes, hovered strange, formless illusions around their heads like misshapen birds. He did sleep-magic the way some men snore: too loud to ignore, too innocent to begrudge. Trixie slips both arms through the hole he’s torn in the side of her and wrenches himself out, inch by inch and drenched in her blood, into the shallow water. He collapses in the surf, too weak to move.

The fish heaves. She is massive. Trixie’s never seen all of a great fish at once, only a tail, only a fin or a glimpse of a head and even then, always obscured behind a frothing bloom of water. Marvel is dwarfed by the crimson shock of her blood in every direction. Trixie gasps out, “Change. Fucking change, witch! I intend to see you - _fuck -_ “ He swallows down his nausea and tries again, louder. “Change! Change and see you are defeated! I want to watch you die in your womanly form, I want to watch your weak female eyes take in the sight of me, the man who bested you -” 

The fish is gone. Katya drifts toward him up the shore, carried gently by the tide. She looks small and pale in her robes. They’re stained in the middle with blood, which ebbs out of her still into the pink water. “Layin’ it on a little thick, tricksy one, don’t you think?” she whispers. She reaches out a hand, touches his cheek, and then she dies. 

The tide hushes around them, murmuring soothing words. Overhead somewhere, gulls cry, smelling death, sensing a feast. With stiff, salt-stuck fingers, Trixie reaches for Katya and drags her body on top of his, hiding his face under hers. “I’m so fucking angry with you,” he whispers. Obscured under her body and her long, heavy hair, he digs into the pouch on his belt. Even a year on, the moly is unwilted. “I’m never gonna recover from this,” he breathes, stuffing a bulb into his mouth and chewing furiously. Katya’s unbreathing mouth has fallen open. He takes another piece and shoves it between her lips whole, holds her mouth shut with the same hand. Into the other, he spits the chewed-up moly, reaches clumsily into her robes and rubs it into the wound. “Oh, witch, if you die, I won’t know what to do with myself.” He gulps down a lump in his throat. “Like, you better pray to your fucking daddy that you’re not actually dead,” he hisses, “because if you put me through all this _and_ you died, I’m going all the way down to the Underworld to drag you back out by the _fucking hair._ ”

Katya doesn’t move. Trixie holds her mouth closed, holds her wound shut. He holds her. The ocean purrs like a tame lion in the forest. The sun is a great golden eye. His head drops down into the sand, and water rushes over his ears, and he finally gives in to sleep.

\---

Rotted, molting wings, they told him. Claws like daggers. Ruined, hideous faces, bodies decaying and withered with age. Maybe, maybe. That’s what they saw. Yeah, well, then, if that’s what they saw.

He remembers it another way. 

In his dreams he can still see them, still hear their voices. An island of women, impossible women, women but _not,_ but something else. Some winged, sure, some with claws, but not just. More than that. Their faces, he remembers - painted and strange, their cheeks too bright and sharp to be true, their eyes too dazzling; like paintings of women, realer than real. So tall. Their hair, their long claws, painted, all that color. Their voices, laughing. Some singing, sure. _Come home,_ they said, their claws outstretched. Even in his dreams he can feel the splinters in his spine, how he struggled and fought to get free. _Come home, where you belong!_ How their garments, their beautiful gowns and robes, danced in the wind, embraced every outsized curve of their bodies. That is my country, he’d screamed to the crew, straining against his ropes, those are my sisters! With their ears stuffed with wax, they could never hear him. In their terror, they wouldn’t have stopped even if they had. 

And as he watched them disappear into the distance, as their song faded on the air, leaving nothing behind but gull-cry and the endless drone of the sea, he felt first panic, then desperate hope - that they might turn back, or that the sirens might follow after and bring him home with them - then a fury that scorched his face and shredded his throat as he twisted against the ropes. And finally the sea was calm and the sky grew clear and his first mate, pulling the wax from his own ears, came to untie him where he hung, head bowed low. He was bloody and chafed red at the wrists from trying to get free. 

That night, he’d laughed with everyone else about the madness that had overtaken him, drank with them until his head spun and every step was a gamble, lost himself in their revelry. When he raised his cup to toast them for the hundredth time, all he could see was his bruised and swollen wrist. When he finally retreated to his quarters, it was all he could feel. And when he dreamed, that night and for many nights after - until he met Katya - those strange, beautiful women, his missing sisters, were all he could hear, in every rock of the ship: _Come home. Come home. Come home._


	9. no gods

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s more bearable once he reaches the trees. The air comes through cool and green, not so - so whatever it is on the beach, so shiny, so vivid. The ground is dark, damp, blanketed in soft moss and tiny white and yellow flowers. Some of them he knows, some he’s never seen before. How far did they come? How far did she swim?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i cannot believe this thing is over. if you're keeping up with the [playlist](https://www.tinyurl.com/stuttersail), we have, needless to say, made it to the end credits. i have so much i want to say, but i'm not going to keep you, i'm just going to get right into it. but there's one thing that absolutely must go at the top: [beanie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/beanierose/pseuds/beanierose) has been there since the very beginning. she was there when this idea got born in our wacky little group chat, she has read every iteration of this story, she has left me gorgeous comments as is her way, she has been a loyal and ferocious beta and a huge cheerleader. this has not been an easy time and she has made space for me and for this story every step of the way. she operates with courage and grace, and i think that's something rare and special which deserves admiration and protection. if you finish this and want something else to read, go dive into any of her wonderful fics and leave a comment telling her how great she is.
> 
> ok. let's close this out.

Trixie opens his eyes. His mind scatters like sparks off a prodded flame. He’s in the ocean, building shapes with his many bodies, staring out into the endless expanse of water, which is dotted with soft white clouds and streaked with wheeling birds - 

He sits up. Sand under his back, air in his lungs. He holds his arms out in front of him. Hands present and accounted for, fingers solid and all in place. He’s squinting ahead into the horizon, the view ahead split cleanly between sea and sky. It’s midday-bright. His stomach swoops, gull-like. Why does it look so different?

He staggers to his feet. Human body. His head spins slightly, as if he’s awoken from a long night of wine and celebration and words he’ll remember any second and regret. But no, actually, the last thing he remembers is - 

“Katya?” he calls out. He coughs, salt in his mouth. “Katya, are you here?” 

_Here_ is still unknown. There’s the sand beneath his toes, sure, cool and dark here, rosy-white further up the shoreline. Trees, lush and pulsing with gentle wind, green as emeralds. Everything feels so bright. The sky, the sea. He takes a halting step toward the treeline, then another. “Katya?”

He trudges up the beach. There’s grass here, waving softly as he passes, just like on the north beach on Katya’s island, but he knows he’s not there. His vision’s still sparkling a little. His eyes can’t adjust. It’s as if the sky is all sun, as if Katya’s father has come closer to peer into his face. “Katya!”

It’s more bearable once he reaches the trees. The air comes through cool and green, not so - so whatever it is on the beach, so shiny, so vivid. The ground is dark, damp, blanketed in soft moss and tiny white and yellow flowers. Some of them he knows, some he’s never seen before. How far did they come? How far did she swim?

“Katya,” he calls again. He’s here, he knows it. His own voice comes back sharply, bouncing off the trees to greet him. “Witch, this isn’t funny. Did I actually kill you, or what?” He swallows hard. “Katya, are you - ”

There’s a lion. It isn’t there, and then it is, standing just a few feet from him in a warm bath of sunlight. It bares its teeth, shakes out its long mane. Trixie’s chest tightens around his heart. “Hi, pretty,” he whispers. He drops to his knees. 

The lion pads closer on its massive, quiet paws. Trixie holds out his arms and the lion walks right into them. He tightens his arms around its golden neck, buries his face in its mane. “I knew it,” he whispers. “I _knew_ it. You think we pulled it off?” 

Katya transforms, wraps him in arms solid and human. “Seems like,” he says. He’s shaking a little. Trixie thinks at first he might be crying, has a reassuring coo on his lips, but then he realizes he’s laughing. “How funny would it have been if it was just a regular old lion, and your first impulse was to give it a hug and you got fucking mauled to death?” he says gleefully, then tosses his head back with a laugh that shakes the birds out of the trees and hits Trixie right in the chest, like a sudden fall into deep, cool water. He shoves Katya down into the moss, kisses him until he can’t laugh anymore. 

“Next time, I’ll kill you for real,” Trixie hisses, running his hands over Katya’s giddy face. “It won’t just be a trick to get the gods off our backs. I’m gonna really do it, witch.” 

“You very nearly did!” Katya giggles. He shifts abruptly, going lighter and smaller under Trixie’s body. “Look.” She spreads her robe open, showing him a long, wicked scar on her abdomen, curving along beside her navel up under one breast. His stomach heaves. “If you hadn’t come in with that moly paste, I would’ve been chum.” 

He doesn’t want to think about it. He takes her robe in his hands and pulls it closed again. She lets out an exaggerated whine, shaking her shoulders at him in a gesture he’s sure she thinks he’ll find very alluring. “C’mon, sailor,” she pouts, “don’t you want to get to know all my insides?” She bats her eyes at him, mewling. He has a retort ready-made in his mouth, but he looks into her eyes and it dies on his tongue. There’s laughter in them, but something else, something different, they’re - 

“Your eyes,” he says, starting back into a sitting position. He looks back over his shoulder in the direction of the ocean, up past the trees, back at a bemused Katya. “Your _eyes!”_

“What about them?” she asks. She sits up, rocks onto her hands and knees, crawls closer. “What’s wrong, Trix?” 

“Nothing, nothing.” He lurches forward now, grabs her face in his hands. “Your eyes, they’re - nothing’s wrong, but they’re - “ He can’t find how to describe it. “I don’t know what they are. They’re like the sea. The color. They have a _color!_ I never… I never saw it before.” 

Katya’s eyes, her sea-colored eyes, grow wide. “ _Oh._ Yeah, they are. They do. Honey, you…you can see it now?” 

Trixie’s head spins as he looks between her lovely, surprised face and the sky he can see through the canopy of trees. “They - when I was in the ocean, when I was - you know, when I was in the sea, it was like - your eyes. They’re like that.” He laughs. “And the sky! Is also like that!” 

“Trixie, what color did you think my eyes were?” she asks slowly. She brings her hands up to cover his where they still clutch her cheeks. 

“I don’t know, I don’t know!” He feels like he might burst into tears. “I don’t - I haven’t got a word for this. I thought, maybe, like, sometimes they looked violet or silver or grey. Or no color at all.” He laughs instead, mouth wide open. They’re so beautiful, stuck in her face like little pieces of the sky itself, bright as the world beneath the waves. “What are they? What is that?” 

She’s smiling at him the way she used to smile at the birds that would light on her hands, the deer that nudged through the window for her attention. “There are some places where people have a name for it.” She pushes her hair behind one ear. “Your people don’t, yet, but I’m sure they’ll get around to it.” She says, very softly, “Blue.” 

“Your eyes are… blue,” he repeats. “Blue.” She nods. Her face is so patient. He kisses her, and she hums against his lips. He pulls away. He wants to stare into her eyes some more, wants to dissolve into them as he did into the sea. “Down there,” he tells her, “everything is blue.” 

A little laugh escapes her this time, a very gentle one. “Yeah, Trix, I know.” 

“Oh, fuck, right, you were a big fish,” he remembers earnestly, and then they both collapse on the ground, howling. The air around them is warm, still, threaded with distant birdsong and the lull of the nearby ocean. They laugh for a long time, clutching each other for support. He should feel stupid, should feel ashamed, but he can’t find the space for that inside himself, not when there’s a life’s worth of blue to consider. 

Finally, when he can breathe again, he nudges her. “Why couldn’t I see it before?” he asks. “You could see it. Couldn’t you?” 

She hums thoughtfully, reaching up to arrange her hair in a pillow behind her head. They stare up into the trees, at the blue blue sky beyond. “I think,” she says, thoughtful and slow in a way she rarely is, “it can be hard for men to see what they can’t name.” She nudges his cheek with her nose. “And it can’t be named, I think, if it can’t be controlled.”

He rolls onto his side, fixing his gaze on her eyes. “I see you, Katya,” he says. 

She rolls over, too. “I see you, Trixie,” she whispers. She leans in and kisses him, pushes her tongue into his mouth. A hungry sound bursts out of him at the feeling. She moves closer, sensing the shift in him, and throws a long leg over his body. Her robe splits, revealing smooth, soft skin, interrupted only by the cruel grin of her scar. He lifts her so she straddles him, pulls her closer to his face so he can lean up and press his mouth to it, carefully, so it won’t hurt. She breathes out a laugh, throwing her head back so her hair tumbles down her spine and grazes his knuckles, his hands locked tight on her hips. She always seems so surprised when he uses his strength like this. He pushes her back down his body and she grins, eyes bright with mischief. “I know it’s not your very favorite,” she says, flashing male just long enough to pout at him some more before turning back, “but will you settle for me like this? It’ll be a lot easier this way, if you can stand it.”

“Shut _up,_ ” Trixie grumbles, making her cackle at him again. He’s desperate for her and she knows it. They tug his clothes out of the way without properly removing them, not bothering with the pin. She lifts up, wincing slightly as her injury pulls. Then she settles, surrounding him. They breathe out together. He can feel the way her thighs tremble from effort. She’s still weak, though he knows she’d never admit it. “What else is blue?” he asks her in a punched-out voice. 

She laughs again, soundlessly. She starts to peel his fingers off her hip and move them where she wants them, but he gets there first. He knows what she likes by now. She falls forward, pinning his shoulders down into the dirt. “What else is blue,” she repeats, her voice as low and level as she can keep it. “Some flowers. Larkspur, sometimes, and hyacinth.” She pushes against him. He gives. “Certain insects. Birds, some, starlings, and - and, and swallows, and lots of the little fish in the sea.” 

“Uh-huh.” He nods, eager. “And what else?” She wrinkles her nose at him, feigning annoyance, even as her mouth drops open. 

“The center of a flame,” she breathes, “when it’s very hot.” 

“Yeah?” Her eyes burn into his. 

“And sometimes blood. Under the skin.” Now those blue eyes close. His arm, still sore, starts to ache from the angle, but he can hardly register anything beyond the look on her face, how it tightens when he touches her the right way. 

“Why?” he asks. She crushes his hand between their bodies and he holds still for her, holds her steady, watches, gives her all he has.

“Don’t know,” she says through clenched teeth. Then her mouth splits in a smile. “Maybe it’s very hot, too.” His body tries to arch off the earth, to orbit with hers. She holds him down, groaning. He can’t hear a single sound besides her, besides the rush of that same hot blood in his ears. 

It’s only a while later, sprawled in the warm sand on the beach under the sizzling blue sky, that Trixie finally thinks to ask some practical questions. “Where are we?” He rolls onto his side, raising his voice to be heard over the waves. “Like, how far did we get?” 

Katya, back turned, makes a high, uncertain noise in his nose. He’s piled all his hair up into a knot as he works. Trixie knows he has just a few moments to admire the long, glistening line of the back of his neck before the knot comes loose and all his hair tumbles down to cover it again. “Pretty far, I guess,” Katya says. His head’s still bowed over his work. Long before Trixie woke he’d magicked down a few trees, honed them into wood planks fine and strong, started to craft the rowboat that he now smooths into shape with his hands as if it’s nothing more than clay. “Hard to tell how fast you’re swimming when you’ve been stuck in one place for so long. You get it. We’re out of your country, I know that much. We’re far from the, you know, the temples, the strongholds of the gods.” 

Trixie pops up into a sitting position and crawls over to join Katya beside the little boat. Katya puckers his lips in Trixie’s direction, the suggestion of a kiss, then goes back to what he’s doing without actually waiting for Trixie’s mouth. “So you think it worked? You think They really believe we’re dead?” 

Katya shrugs. “If They do, it doesn’t mean They can’t still figure it out,” he says. “Our best hope is that They decide we’re just too much trouble, too far away. Here, blow on this for me, will you?” He holds out a fistful of leaves and moss he brought back from the dark green heart of the forest. Trixie, brows knitted, lets out a tentative huff of air. Katya rolls his eyes. “Come on, sailor,” he says, nudging him, “ _really_ blow.” 

“You’d love that, wouldn’t you?” Trixie deadpans, making Katya shriek into the salty air. But he takes in a deep breath anyway and does, blowing on the greenery with all his might. 

After everything, he’s hardly even surprised when the leaves whirl from Katya’s hands and unfurl into a wide, shining green sail. He gives it a shake and it flaps proudly into place on a tall, thin mast, which Katya hefts into the center of the boat and seems to secure down with a few twists. “There,” he says, getting to his feet and taking a step back to admire his work. He folds his arms across his chest. “Guess what, Trix? We can go anywhere.” His face registers a twinge, almost like pain. “Anywhere but back, I guess.” 

Trixie feels the truth of it under his chin, in his chest. No going back. In the summer, on the hills of the kingdom that was meant to be his, he used to play his lyre for hours while he tended the sheep. Back before the war, back before everything. How the sun looked behind the palace when it rose, the way it glittered off the sea. How there was nothing to do but study, but play, but wait for his destiny to sweep him up into its mighty arms and shove him out onto the dais. In some other life he might’ve been a good king. “I had this crown,” he says now, sudden enough that he almost surprises himself, “but I never wore it. It just sat in a room, gathering dust.” He thinks. “A scepter, too. Don’t think I ever touched it.”

Katya blinks female, then shifts back again. “I really fucked this whole thing up for you, huh?”

“No, that’s not what I mean.” Trixie shakes his head. “You tried to let me go. I didn’t want to.” He gestures out at the sea. “Like, I thought I had a crew, and it turns out they just wanted to sleep and mud-wrestle and have babies. You know? I thought I was a king, but I never even wore my crown. What kind of king is that?” 

Katya’s looking down at his hands, his jaw set. Trixie grabs his hands and squeezes them in his own. A sudden rush of heat pulses through his body. “The world is full of kings, Katya,” he says. Katya looks up at him, pale blue hope in his eyes. Trixie’s pulse pounds in the back of his mouth. “Hey,” he says, keeping his voice low and level. “You told me you know about the sirens.” 

Katya shifts female and holds it this time. She nods, her eyes narrowed. 

“You said you were thought to be one.” Katya nods again. Another shiver goes through him. “Are you?” 

“I don’t know,” Katya says, lifting one shoulder. “I never thought about it too much.” Trixie nods. His eyes find the stoic blue mouth of the horizon, stare it down. He looks back at Katya. He feels like he might scream, might laugh, might unleash some unholy combination of the two. 

“You wanna find out?” he asks her. 

Katya laughs abruptly. Right on schedule, her hair topples out of its knot and falls all around her face. “You’re crazier than I am,” she says. “You still got fish brains, Trix? Aren’t they monsters?” 

“Aren’t you?” Trixie shoots back. “Aren’t I?” 

“No, you’re a hero,” Katya says.

“And you’re the witch who bested me.” He starts shoving the little boat toward the water. Behind him, she’s still laughing. The sound wheels above their heads like a flock of seabirds, but she holds her form, stays on the ground with him. “Come on. I like our odds, Katya.” He turns to look at her. It feels like there’s a hundred hundred of him again, that his heart is swirling through the sea of his body. “Come on,” he breathes. “Don’t you?” 

\---

The little boat shouldn’t cut through the water with such ease - not without oarsmen, not with the air as still as it is. But it skids over the ocean like a skipped stone, light and effortless, meeting no resistance. The little boat moves like it has no time for _should_. The breath gets sucked from Trixie’s mouth again and again, until finally he has to bury his face in Katya’s hair just so he can inhale. She’s got an arm looped casually around the mast, her gaze cast out toward the endless blue waves. Her eyes stream the same as his from the bite of the air, but her expression is calm as moonlight, her mouth pulled up in an easy grin. 

So many things _shouldn’t._ What’s the point? What chance can _shouldn’t_ stand in the face of _does?_ “How?” he asks instead, and when she doesn’t respond, deaf in the roar of the wind, he yells, “Katya, the boat, _how?”_

She looks at him, her mouth twisting with held-back amusement. Always laughing at him, even now. “You wanna see something _crazy?”_ she yells back into his face. 

“I don’t know!” he screams. His voice comes out shrill and giddy. For so long, he didn’t laugh at all, never raised his voice, afraid of what might be revealed about him in the sound. He used to watch every step, afraid of the twigs he might snap, how he might give away his position to any enemy ear. Always going to his knees in penitence, his face hidden in the dirt. 

“Sure you do!” Katya howls back. “Okay, sailor. Hold on tight!” 

She grabs his hands in her long fingers and wraps them around the mast, securing him in place. Then, staring him down with her bright blue eyes, she snakes an arm around his waist and shoves her hand hard against the tattoo she carved into his chest. 

The boat leaps, throwing them both nearly off their feet. Trixie clings to the mast with both hands and Katya, shrieking with laughter, holds tight to him. They soar forward, flying over the water like a shot arrow. It shouldn’t. They shouldn’t. None of this - if the gods find out, if They catch on, if They were never fooled in the first place, if They watch them even now - he shouldn’t lie, shouldn’t seek out monsters and fall in love with witches and turn his back on the gods even when They abandon him first. But he does, he does, he does. He laughs with her, staring into her ecstatic face, high and loud and wild. He feels his fear rattle, come loose, shudder on its hinges, and finally get ripped away in the wind, left behind in an instant, leaving him raw and open and hers, at last; leaving him, at last, his own.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> here's an [incredible podcast](https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/segments/211213-sky-isnt-blue) about the ancient greeks and the color blue. highly recommended listening.
> 
> thank you so, so much for coming on this journey with me. if you left kudos or comments, if you subscribed, if you bookmarked, even in secret, i see you and you mean the world to me. i of course am dying to know what you think about this story - please tell me in the comments, or find me on tumblr at @stutter8. i am not always the fastest replier, but i do really try to get to all of them. they mean the world to me, and so do you. i'm done telling this story, but definitely not done talking about it, so if you have questions, thoughts, feelings, anything, i'm very _very_ interested in hearing them. okay. i love you. thank you again.


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